What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

by Monica Crowley

  The roots of the upheaval are vast and diverse. Much of the Arab world lived under repressive regimes that allowed little or no personal freedom while their economic conditions deteriorated under rising food prices and sky-high unemployment, particularly among young people. Fed up with their regimes’ inability and unwillingness to improve economic conditions and grant them even the most basic human rights, many in the Arab world discovered the courage to stand up to their governments.

  It was a courage first inspired by President Bush, who advocated an aggressive “freedom agenda,” about which Obama had expressed his opposition, primarily because it was applied most controversially in Iraq. But the overthrow of Saddam Hussein allowed the Iraqi people to be liberated from exactly the kind of dictator millions of Arabs protested in early 2011. The power of the Iraqi example is difficult to measure, but what isn’t tough to see is the widespread desire for a greater voice.

  The Arab Spring actually began over a year earlier with the Persian Spring, when a genuine revolt against tyranny began next door to Iraq, in Iran. On June 13, 2009, millions of Iranians poured into the streets, outraged over what they viewed as a fraudulent election that handed the presidency back to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over opposition candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Mousavi’s campaign color had been green, and his supporters wore the color when they demonstrated against the regime, leading the movement to be called the Green Revolution. Protesters relied heavily on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites to communicate with each other, until the government slowed them or shut them down completely. Soon, however, much of Tehran and other major cities were seas of green. The Iranian regime wasted little time cracking down. It began mass arrests of prominent reformist leaders, human rights advocates, and journalists. The Iranian government militia, the Basij, stormed the protests, deploying tear gas, breaking into houses and businesses, rounding people up and detaining them, and firing live ammunition into the crowds, killing and injuring dozens of people. As the casualties mounted and women were raped and tortured, Obama did nothing. As Iranian militias attacked students in their dorm rooms and Internet censorship spread, Obama did nothing. The mullahcracy that had been the number one state sponsor of terror for thirty years was teetering on the brink of collapse … and Obama did nothing.

  While millions of Iranians were courageously taking their lives in their hands, they looked to the United States for support. They would have appreciated covert assistance in terms of sophisticated communication technology that would have allowed them to get around Tehran’s censorship, among other things. But they would have settled for some basic moral support, a word or two from the American president in support of their aspirations for greater freedom. Instead, they got crickets and tumbleweeds from the White House. The seat reserved for the Leader of the Free World was empty.

  During the 2008 campaign, Obama had promised to open negotiations with Iran “without preconditions.” Several months after he became president, Obama sent good tidings to the regime at the start of the Iranian new year. He offered “the promise of a new beginning” that was “grounded in mutual respect.” That came after his inaugural address announcement that he’d cozy up to enemies like Iran: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Iran greeted his “extended hand” by grabbing three American hikers on its border and holding them for two years, escalating war games, and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which over one-third of the world’s oil flows.

  Obama’s obsession with striking a grand bargain with the Iranian regime over its nuclear weapons program was based on a single objective: he wanted to strike a historic rapprochement with Iran. If Nixon could walk through the streets of Beijing in 1972, Obama could very well walk through the streets of Tehran. Nothing would alter Obama’s course of pursuing “engagement” with the Iranian terrorist dictators, not even their mass slaughter of their own people.

  Obama thought that through the sheer force of his dazzling persona, he’d be able to convince the mullahs to at least pretend to want to give up the nuke dream. That, of course, was absurd on its face. Once Iran got a nuke, it would dominate the Persian Gulf, threaten Israel’s very survival, and set off a regional arms race that would likely see Saudi Arabia and possibly Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey going nuclear. In fact, in early 2012 Saudi Arabia struck a deal with China to develop nuclear capability. The entire Middle East—already a white-hot tinderbox—would explode in nuclear-weapons-driven instability, but Iran would be driving the bus. They were getting tantalizingly close to their game-changing possession of a nuke just as the American president was making a yahoo out of himself with his “extended hand.”

  Meanwhile, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program through the United Nations and the Europeans dragged on. A lot of talking was done, mostly by everyone but the Iranians. Time and again, the Iranians talked and stalled, stalled and talked. In November 2009, Team Obama said it was willing to give Iran more time to decide whether to accept a UN-brokered deal to get Iran to move its stocks of low-enriched uranium to Russia or another country in exchange for fuel for a nuclear medicine laboratory. Iran hemmed and hawed, asking for countless amendments and more talks. The U.S. government offered all kinds of incentives, from Miley Cyrus tickets to a week of all-inclusive heaven at Sandals in Jamaica. They even offered up a chance for Ayatollah Khamenei to hang out with the stars of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant. In the end, the Iranians bailed on the deal.

  Instead of dealing more realistically with a regime that had no intention of negotiating away its nuclear weapons program, Obama continued to make more accommodations, including dropping a key condition that Iran shut down its nuclear facilities during the early stages of talks. European negotiators, along with Team Obama, said they were interested in “building trust,” to which the Iranians replied by again laughing themselves silly.

  As those “negotiations” were going on, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office unsealed a 118-count indictment accusing a Chinese national of setting up fake companies to hide his sale of millions of dollars in potential nuclear materials to Iran. And then in late July 2011, Obama’s own Treasury Department accused Iranian authorities of aiding al-Qaeda in Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, and Pakistan. A few months after that, in October 2011, Obama’s Justice Department busted two men with ties to Iran for allegedly plotting to blow up the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington and to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. This is the same Iran about which Team Obama was still “unclear” as to whether it was pursuing nuclear weapons, the same Persian Shiite country that leftists who pose as Middle East experts constantly swear would never assist an Arab Sunni terrorist network like al-Qaeda.

  In November 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency issued a definitive report saying that Iran was, in fact, actively conducting work “specific” to nuclear arms. Furthermore, the Iranian government put on a four-day “firepower show” earlier that year that showcased new missiles, developed with the help of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean technology, that have a range of 1,200 miles—putting Israel and U.S. allies, forces, and interests in the region easily within striking distance.

  And still, Team Obama chased the Iranians—in Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s case, literally. At a gala dinner in Bahrain in 2010, she chased Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki around the room, hoping to get a word with him, only to be completely blown off. Clinton told reporters on the plane ride home, “I got up to leave and he was sitting several seats down from me and … he saw me and he stopped and began to turn away. And I said, ‘Hello, Minister!’ And he just turned away.” Denied! But Hillary went back for another insult. While they were both standing outside waiting for their motorcades, Clinton called out to Mottaki again, only to be met by his stony silence, like Sandra Bullock’s giddy stalker char
acter in All About Steve.

  Obama’s “extended hand” approach was, from the beginning, appeasement. After months of olive branches, bending over backward to accommodate the Iranians, lavishing them with money and other incentives, groveling at them at formal dinners and, apologizing incessantly for big, bad America, Tehran was still moving at breakneck speed to develop nuclear weapons. It got so obvious that even Obama, who had staked so much on his personal ability to get Iran off its nuclear track, had to go along with some financial sanctions. In early August 2011, ninety-two of one hundred senators sent Obama a letter demanding “crippling sanctions” on Iran’s central bank, some of which the administration ultimately imposed.

  Throughout the discussion of ramped-up sanctions, the Russians and the Chinese resisted them. Russia is the Costco for radical Islamic regimes, communist states, totalitarian dictatorships, and banana republics. They all go shopping there, buy big, and get great discounts. When Russian president Dmitry Medvedev visited the United States in September 2009 and indicated a possible willingness to support increased sanctions, it was described later by the Russians as Medvedev’s merely being “polite” to Obama, not as a major shift in Russian policy. As Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin put it, “There is no need to frighten the Iranians.”

  Without truly regime-ending sanctions, Iran continues its march toward becoming a nuclear-armed terrorist state, unless either the United States or Israel takes some form of military action to foster regime change or at least set the program back, as the Israelis did by bombing Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 and a suspect nuclear facility in Syria in 2007. Don’t be surprised if Obama approves military action against Iran as we approach the presidential election in order to sow new chaos to make voters forget about his old chaos and to encourage a rallying effect. He is, after all, a Machiavellian Alinskyite. Absent direct military action or the full success of the cloak-and-dagger covert campaign against Iran’s nuke program, however, Tehran will careen headlong to a “breakout” moment with its nuclear program, giving the mullahs—who deny the Holocaust; call for eliminating Israel; support al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas; export international terror; and help to kill American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan—the ability to extort and commit mass murder with weapons of mass destruction.

  As they worked on nukes, those multitasking Iranian leaders continued to mow down their people. When Obama did finally address the situation, he issued a vague statement to the “Supreme Leader” on the election-results controversy. The United States had been waiting for thirty years for this moment in Iran and the president makes a weak comment essentially supportive of the Supreme Leader who was killing them in the streets? The Iranian protesters must have thought, “What the @$%&! just happened?” If Obama had offered greater moral and even material support to the 2009 Iranian revolution, the ramifications may have been sweeping. If it had succeeded, it would have dealt a major blow to Islamic radicalism and terror. Iran’s nuclear weapons program may have been significantly slowed or even stopped. Terrorist states such as Syria and terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah, who lean on Iran for financial and military support, may have been weakened. There may have been a collective sigh of relief in the Sunni Arab world that the Shia mullahs were no longer a threat. In retrospect, Bush perhaps should have moved on Iran rather than Iraq, as some foreign policy observers argued at the time, but when Obama had the opening, he wouldn’t move on Iran either.

  In the end, the man who ran on “hope and change” simply couldn’t support those things for the Iranian people.

  Obama’s impotence led to an even greater perception in Tehran that America was in terminal decline, and therefore there was no need for the regime to consider Obama’s prostrating offers on their nuclear program or to fear U.S. threats. If the American president couldn’t even muster a “go get ’em” for the Iranian people as they stared down tanks and guns, then he was a paper tiger. Iran slapped away Obama’s hand each time he extended it—including blocking the “virtual” U.S. “embassy” Hillary’s State Department had put online and Obama’s pathetic, repeated attempts to reach out to the Supreme Leader for “talks.” And the paper tiger kept cowering in a cage of its own making.

  If there was any positive fallout from the Iranian people’s courage in 2009, it was seen in the millions of Arabs who poured into their streets a year and a half later to demand their own change. In the initial stages of the Arab revolts, the usual rabid anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiment weren’t apparent. Early on, hundreds of thousands of people poured into the streets in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon, followed by demonstrations in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain, and even a part of Saudi Arabia.

  The most consequential revolt took place in Egypt, the most populous Arab state and the most strategically important. Having seen Tunisia’s longtime dictator overthrown by largely peaceful mass demonstrations, many Egyptians thought they might be able to dislodge their longtime president, Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak had come to power in 1981 following the assassination of his predecessor, Anwar el-Sadat, at the hands of the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak was rampantly corrupt, abusive, repressive, and tyrannical at home, but abroad he was a pragmatist. He continued Sadat’s policy of peace with Israel, outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups, and maintained a strong alliance with the United States, which rewarded him with over $1.3 billion annually in military and other aid.

  So when the crud hit the fan in Egypt on January 25, 2011, and the masses began filling the streets to protest his rule, Mubarak could have reasonably expected that the United States would either back him or stay out of the internal situation completely, as it had with Iran. Instead, Obama saw big crowds of indeterminate nature in the street of Cairo and, within eight days, told Mubarak to scram. Sitting alone, late at night, contemplating the American knife in his back, Mubarak could be heard mumbling, “What the @$%&! just happened?”

  Obama, who had publicly dissed Bush’s “freedom agenda” and squashed it in Iran, now attempted to co-opt it by micromanaging Egypt’s revolt. With so much at stake strategically in Egypt, the United States should have been helping to move it toward a government more consistent with our values of political and economic freedom and rule of law as well as respect for those like Israel that embody those values. Instead, Obama took actions that assured a very different kind of outcome in Egypt.

  Was Mubarak a dictator? No, said Biden. Yes, according to everyone else in the Obama administration. Should he bug out? Yes, and like “yesterday,” according to Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs. Obama himself said he should consider his “legacy” and “go.” But according to Obama’s own special envoy to Egypt, Ambassador Frank Wisner, he should stay for the sake of stability. Not so fast, according to Secretary Clinton, who suggested that we’d be okay with Mubarak staying in office but allowing Vice President Omar Suleiman to run the show. For how long? Unnamed “senior administration officials” said elections must take place by June 2011, but Clinton said September would be fine. In the middle of a major foreign policy crisis, we didn’t get a president and his team speaking with a single voice. We got a cacophony.

  Our other allies in the region, from the Saudis to the Jordanians and the Israelis, watched this tangled diplomatic mess and were frantic with worry and exasperation. If Obama could so easily discard such a key, long-standing ally, might they be next? America’s friendship just got seriously downgraded. And America’s prestige in the Arab world skidded into the dumps. No longer feared, we were also no longer trusted or even liked.

  While Team Obama was busy destroying American influence in the region, the crowds in Tahrir Square were kicking it up to the next level. Pro-Mubarak forces emerged on camelback and violent altercations broke out. Nearly a thousand people were killed and scores more injured.

  Back in the West, we romanticized the revolt. In its earliest stages, there were some protesters who did truly wa
nt greater freedom, more economic opportunity, and better human rights for the Egyptian people. But were they the majority of the protesters? Was that the goal of the organizers? Is that what most Egyptians wanted? These were serious questions, which few people (least of whom the president) bothered to ask at the time. For decades, Mubarak warned that if he were to lose his grip on power, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists would seize the levers of power in Egypt. Many foreign policy elites derided that as a false choice that was meant to frighten us into constant support of his regime. And yet, golly gee, it turns out that Mubarak knew Egypt better than they did.

  The Egyptian protests began with a small group of organizers meeting in the Cairo apartment of one of their mothers. It included a few student leaders, Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who would mobilize social media to get people into the streets, and two representatives from … the Muslim Brotherhood.

  The Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, was founded in Egypt in 1928 and is now the world’s most important and dangerous Islamist organization. It is openly committed to the infiltration and ultimate destruction of the United States, the West, and Israel. Its motto is: “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our Leader; the Koran is our Law; Jihad is our way; Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope—Allahu Akbar!”

  And yet, Team Obama thinks this is a group with whom we can do business. Previous contacts with the Brotherhood had occurred outside U.S. policy, egged on mainly by leftists in the State Department, intelligence communities, and Team Obama. As part of his vaunted policy of “engagement” with our enemies, Obama opened formal contacts with the Brotherhood and sought out its Palestinian terror branch, Hamas. The previous policy of non-engagement with the Brotherhood was meant to prevent a legitimizing of its stealth jihadist agenda and designating its leaders as mainstream. But Team Obama moved to do exactly that.