Fouad Ajami posted on op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal about President Obama's handling of the events in Iran. Fouad Ajami is a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and the author of "The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq (Free Press, 2007).
Professor Ajami feels that President Obama naively felt that he would be able to use his own biography to reach out to governments that previously had been hostile to the United States. President Obama had extended an olive branch to Iran and waited for Iran to unclench its fist. Professor Ajami compared that to another American President who felt that he could make peace with the Russians but denouncing the militarism that had come before him--the Russians answered by invading Afghanistan.
Professor Ajami points out:
"Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution -- and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver."
America's silence as people are dying for the sake of freedom is not something to be proud of. Traditionally we have supported the voices of freedom (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia). Keeping silent for imagined political expediency is not a positive thing.
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