Here’s Michael Goldfarb:

The left wanted Obama to keep his mouth shut for fear of undermining the protesters by allowing the regime to portray them as U.S. pawns. Well, at what point does Obama risk alienating a future generation of Iranians by sitting on the sidelines as they get butchered in the streets?

But then, do liberals stand for liberty? For me, but not for thee?

Americans, European Union, international community, this government is not definitely — is definitely not elected by the majority of Iranians. So it’s illegal. Do not recognize it. Stop trading with them. Impose much more sanctions against them. My message…to the international community, especially I’m addressing President Obama directly – how can a government that doesn’t recognize its people’s rights and represses them brutally and mercilessly have nuclear activities? This government is a huge threat to global peace. Will a wise man give a sharp dagger to an insane person? We need your help international community. Don’t leave us alone.

– Iranian protester to CNN’s John Roberts and Kiran Chetry.

President Obama watches CNN, doesn’t he?

Being president is about making decisions — it’s why we call it the “Executive” branch of government. You know, all during the Bush presidency the political left promoted the argument that one of the primary faults of conservatives, particularly the “Neo-cons,” is that they only saw things in black and white. This argument is, of course, a steaming pile of excrement. It’s not that conservatives only see black and white, they see the shades of gray and understand complexities just fine. They just don’t use the “shades of gray” as an excuse for inaction and ineptitude. Sometimes you just gotta make a damn decision. And this is especially true if one is the American president.

Browsing the internet coverage of the protests in Iran (indeed, the very descriptor “protest” has since become an understatement to say the least) it seems that the grays are disappearing and the white and black of the conflict is becoming readily clear. No, Iranian opposition leader Hossein Mousavi isn’t Sam Adams. He probably isn’t even a Mikhail Gorbachev. And perhaps he’s just as much the anti-Semitic racist and holocaust denier that Iranian “president” Ahmadinejad is. But so what? The United States, under better leadership from our president, could better support the people of Iran without giving legitimacy to the Iranian theocracy, whether under Mousavi or not. As Charles Krauthammer explains below, this could be — should be — a grand opportunity to create real change in Iran. Or is change for he, but not for thee?

Obama’s nuance is now to a fault. It’s a sick statement that the outrage from leaders in France and Germany, for instance, have been far stronger than Obama. No conservative is saying send in the troops. But the bland message from Obama becomes at some point complicity and quiet support of the Iranian regime. Perhaps that’s not fair but it’s going to become truth if Obama isn’t careful. The fact is the Ayatollah is going to blame Obama, the West, the “Zionist media,” the CIA, Capitalism, and every other bogey man under the sun no matter if Obama takes a stand or not.

Here’s Krauthammer:

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What’s at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime — and the future of the entire Middle East.

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 — the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt — was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.

Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception — Iraq and Lebanon — becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.

All hangs in the balance. The Khamenei regime is deciding whether to do a Tiananmen. And what side is the Obama administration taking? None. Except for the desire that this “vigorous debate” (press secretary Robert Gibbs’s disgraceful euphemism) over election “irregularities” not stand in the way of U.S.-Iranian engagement on nuclear weapons.

The President yesterday denounced the “extent of the fraud” and the “shocking” and “brutal” response of the Iranian regime to public demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

“These elections are an atrocity,” he said. “If [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?” The statement named the regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

The President who spoke those words was France’s Nicolas Sarkozy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era of Obama.

– Wall Street Journal.

Good questions and points by Bill Kristol:

“Smart power” is a modification of “soft power,” which the Obama-ites are also huge fans of. Well, isn’t this the time to try some soft power?

For example: Statements of support for fair elections and peaceful protest; personal outreach to endangered opposition leaders (if not by us, then by Europeans–though how dramatic would it be if Sec. Clinton placed a phone call to Mousavi to make sure he’s not under arrest and is free to talk?); an immediate infusion of funds to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Radio Farda service, which provides invaluable information from and within Iran; technical assistance against the regime’s attempts to block websites, shut down cell phone networks, etc.; suspension (by the Europeans) of various cultural and commercial contacts; pressure through international organizations on behalf of the Iranian peopleIf the administration remains passive (or even if it doesn’t), there’s certainly a case for a congressional resolution ASAP supporting the people of Iran in their struggle for democracy, calling on the Iranian regime to allow international monitors to review the election results, calling on the Iranian government to allow peaceful demonstrations, to stop jamming radios and blocking the internet, etc.; and for congressional action (an amendment to the next bill to be brought up in the Senate) and/or hearings on increased funding for Radio Farda and the like.

Soft power ain’t hard power, but it can make a difference. Shouldn’t the Obama administration at least try to exercise some? Or don’t they believe in soft power? Are they just soft?

“The four candidates whose names made it on the presidential ballot this year were pre-screened by an unelected Guardian Council composed mostly of Islamic clerics, which also disqualified more than 400 others,” reminds the Wall Street Journal. So, yeah, the Iranian “election” was a predetermined sham long before the final votes were (or rather were not) tallied. That same Guardian Council, headed by the Ayatollah, determines every aspect of society, from its religious and social laws, to its lack of freedoms and liberty, to its economy and terrorism activities.

Even so, the West looks especially weak. It’s not just the reaction — again or lack thereof — by the Obama camp, but the entire Western world’s lack of condemnation of Iran’s brazen tyranny, that risks alienating and subverting all those Iranian citizens begging for support. There are literally hundreds of diplomatic postures that the West, and especially the United States, could take to vocally condemn Iran’s fraud and stomping of liberty. So far, silence, or at best, bland statements “of concern.”

Having shown such courage, the demonstrators deserve Western support, not least from the media that have recently trumpeted the Mousavi candidacy as evidence of Iran’s openness and potential for reform, conciliation and so on. Whatever happens in the days ahead, the world has now seen the tyranny raw. The least we owe the protestors is not to look away.

That moral obligation goes especially for the Obama Administration. President Obama came to office promising the world’s dictators an open hand in exchange for an unclenched fist. But as with Kim Jong Il’s nuclear advances and the sham trial of two Americans in North Korea, Mr. Khamenei has repudiated the President’s diplomacy of friendly overture. It turns out that the “axis of evil” really is evil — and not, as liberal sages would have it, merely misunderstood.

The vote should prompt Mr. Obama to rethink his pursuit of a grand nuclear bargain with Iran, though early indications suggest he plans to try anyway. On Saturday, the New York Times quoted one unnamed senior Administration official to the effect that the election uproar would cause Mr. Ahmadinejad to be more receptive to Mr. Obama’s overtures as a sop to disgruntled public opinion. If the Administration really believes this, then Mr. Obama is the second coming of Jimmy Carter and the mullahs will play him for time to get their bomb.

However, Mr. Obama has also stressed the importance of democracy, rule of law and transparency, most recently in the June 4 Cairo speech in which he addressed himself directly to the world’s Muslims, Iranian-Muslims included. Now the stand-off in Tehran will test — more quickly than Mr. Obama probably imagined — whether he was serious when he said “we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments — provided they govern with respect for all their people.”

Here’s Bret Stephens, and yet another read the whole thing:

Sometimes it takes “South Park” to explain life’s deeper mysteries. Like the logic of the Obama administration’s policy proposals.

Consider the 1998 “Gnomes” episode — possibly surpassing Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” as the classic defense of capitalism — in which the children of South Park, Colo., get a lesson in how not to run an enterprise from mysterious little men who go about stealing undergarments from the unsuspecting and collecting them in a huge underground storehouse.

What’s the big idea? The gnomes explain:

“Phase One: Collect underpants.

“Phase Two: ?

“Phase Three: Profit.”

Lest you think there’s a step missing here, that’s the whole point. (“What about Phase Two?” asks one of the kids. “Well,” answers a gnome, “Phase Three is profits!”) This more or less sums up Mr. Obama’s speech last week on Guantanamo, in which the president explained how he intended to dispose of the remaining detainees after both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly against bringing them to the U.S.

The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!

Granted, this is an abbreviated exegesis of his speech, which did explain how some two-thirds of the detainees will be tried by military commissions or civilian courts, or repatriated to other countries. But on the central question of the 100-odd detainees who can neither be tried in court nor released one searches in vain for an explanation of exactly what the president intends to do.

Now take the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Phase One: Talk to Iran, Syria, whoever. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Peace!

In this case, the administration seems to think that diplomacy, like aspirin, is something you take two of in the morning to take away the pain. But as Boston University’s Angelo Codevilla notes in his book, “Advice to War Presidents,” diplomacy “can neither create nor change basic intentions, interests, or convictions. . . . To say, ‘We’ve got a problem. Let’s try diplomacy, let’s sit down and talk’ abstracts from the important questions: What will you say? And why should anything you say lead anyone to accommodate you?”

Ditto for Mr. Obama’s approach to nuclear weapons. In a speech last month in Prague, right after North Korea had illegally tested a ballistic missile, Mr. Obama promised a new nonproliferation regime, along with “a structure in place that ensures when any nation [breaks the rules], they will face consequences.” Whereupon the U.N. Security Council promptly failed to muster the votes for a resolution condemning Pyongyang’s launch.

Now Kim Jong Il has tested another nuke, and we’re back at the familiar three-step. Phase One: Propose a “structure.” . . .

It was also in his Prague speech that Mr. Obama repeated his pledge to “confront climate change by ending the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, by tapping the power of new sources of energy like the wind and sun.”

Never mind that neither the wind nor the sun are new sources of energy. It so happens that the U.S. gets about 2.3% of its energy resources from “renewable” resources of the kind the president advocates while fossil fuels account for about 70%. The reason for this, alas, has nothing to do with the greed of the oil majors. But it has much to do with something known as “energy density”: Crude oil has almost three times as much of it as switchgrass, supposedly the Holy Grail of our green future. A related problem is that heat invariably dissipates, meaning that it will always be difficult to turn diffuse sources of energy, like wind, into concentrated ones.

In Gnome-speak, then, Mr. Obama’s energy policy goes something like this: Phase One: Inaugurate the era of “green” energy. Phase Two: Overturn the first and second laws of thermodynamics. Phase Three: Carbon neutrality!

Take any number of Mr. Obama’s other initiatives. Rescue Detroit? Phase One: Set a national mileage standard for passenger cars of 39 miles per gallon and force auto makers to make the kind of cars that drove them to bankruptcy in the first place.

Reduce the deficit? Phase One: Approve $3.5 trillion in government stimulus, and then await the mythical Keynesian multiplier.

Pay for a $1.2 trillion health-care reform? Phase One: scrounge around for about $60 billion in new “sin tax” revenue.

Actually, we can easily guess how Mr. Obama intends to make up the difference on this last item: To wit, by taxing health benefits. Taxes, subsidies funded by taxes, regulations and mandates will also fill in many (though not all) of the other blanks. Underpants gnomes: meet Phase Two. Say, what happened to profits?

BEIRUT — Roxana Saberi, a 31-year-old Iranian-American journalist, was convicted of spying and sentenced to eight years in prison on Saturday by Iran’s Revolutionary Court.

Ms. Saberi, a former American beauty queen, has been in detention in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since Jan. 31. She was charged with espionage earlier this month and tried this week behind closed doors.

Yes, yes, the Obama administration is “deeply disappointed” and all that jazz, but what do they intend to actually do about it? Nothing. Just like they have no response to Iran’s continued arms proliferation in defiance of their diplospeak and dialogue and engagement and “reset button,” ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

And while debatably true that the Bush administration (or Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan, and certainly Carter) would likewise have no response one must ponder who is the most arrogant of them all — I say the most arrogant are those pollyanna types who thought just replacing Bush with an Apologist in Chief would somehow lead to a different Iran (or North Korea, or South American tinpot dictator, etc.). Instead we’re viewed as weak.

As the Wall Street Journal opined earlier this week, “Goodwill begets an espionage trial.”

We do no favors coddling the world’s autocracies and anti-Democracy militants. Here’s Reuel Marc Gerecht:

Following in the footsteps of the Bush administration, Mr. Obama wants to avoid labeling our enemy in religious terms. References to “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamic radicalism,” or “Islamic extremism” aren’t in his speeches. “Jihad,” too, has been banished from the official lexicon.

But if one visits the religious bookstores near Istanbul’s Covered Bazaar, or mosque libraries of Turkish immigrants in Rotterdam, Brussels or Frankfurt, one can still find a cornucopia of radical Islamist literature. Go into the bookstores of Arab and Pakistani immigrant communities in Europe, or into the literary markets of the Arab world and the Indian subcontinent, and you’ll find an even richer collection of militant Islamism.

Al Qaeda is certainly not a mainstream Muslim group — if it were, we would have had far more terrorist attacks since 9/11. But the ideology that produced al Qaeda isn’t a rivulet in contemporary Muslim thought. It is a wide and deep river. The Obama administration does both Muslims and non-Muslims an enormous disservice by pretending otherwise.

Mark Steyn, funny as usual:

Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the last 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and “distractions,” as opposed to about 800 “distractions” for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: “First North Korea, Iran — now Somali pirates.”

Er, okay. So the North Korean test is a “distraction,” the Iranian nuclear program is a “distraction,” and the seizure of a U.S.-flagged vessel in international waters is a “distraction.” Maybe it would be easier just to have the official State Department maps reprinted with the Rest of the World relabeled “Distractions.” Oh, to be sure, you could still have occasional oases of presidential photo-opportunities — Buckingham Palace, that square in Prague — but with the land beyond the edge of the Queen’s gardens ominously marked “Here be distractions . . . ”

[Washington Post] Senior Obama administration officials are debating how to address a potential terrorist threat to U.S. interests from a Somali extremist group, with some in the military advocating strikes against its training camps. But many officials maintain that uncertainty about the intentions of the al-Shabab organization dictates a more patient, nonmilitary approach.

Al-Shabab, whose fighters have battled Ethiopian occupiers and the tenuous Somali government, poses a dilemma for the administration, according to several senior national security officials who outlined the debate only on the condition of anonymity.

The organization’s rapid expansion, ties between its leaders and al-Qaeda, and the presence of Americans and Europeans in its camps have raised the question of whether a preemptive strike is warranted. Yet the group’s objectives have thus far been domestic, and officials say that U.S. intelligence has no evidence it is planning attacks outside Somalia.

Gee, isn’t international waters “outside Somalia?” No matter. Team Obama is “mulling” their response. We can all take comfort in that. As can the families of victims terrorized and captured by Somali pirates. By “mulling” of course I mean weakness, which only encourages more acts of piracy. Obama is making Jimmy Carter look down right hawkish.

“The shores of Tripoli” isn’t just a rhyme in a patriotic song, it’s a solution President Thomas Jefferson offered his era’s piracy problems.

Wonder over what other events the Obama team is mulling?

Iran perhaps?

“Today, with the grace of God, Iran is a country controlling the entire nuclear fuel cycle,” proclaimed Iranian “President” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Iran now controls the entire cycle for producing nuclear fuel with the opening of a new facility to produce uranium fuel pellets,” according to the Associated Press. It’s reportedly the last step in creating nuclear fuel.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia successfully test-fired a Topol intercontinental ballistic missile on Friday as part of checks needed to extend its service life for up to 22 years, Russian media reported.

So much for Obama’s new arms control era.

And of course North Korea. It’s recent missile launching is “turning into an early test of the Obama administration’s U.N.-focused multilateralism.” In other words, Team Obama isn’t getting any further along with U.N. cooperation than Bush before him (or Clinton before him, and so on), did.

Just a few months ago Obama ridiculed his presidential opponent for needed to do more than one thing at a time. It’s a little harder when one is president though.