Denounce! Renounce! Etc.

In trying to break down the "Obama Should Denounce!" crowd into some subsets, I came up with the following five groups:br /olliObama is being quiet because he thinks that US intervention would cause the situation in Iran to deteriorate; he's wrong about that./liliObama is being quiet because he thinks that the US can still win concessions from Iran on the nuclear program, and doesn't want to endanger that possibility; he's either a) wrong about the possibility of winning concessions, or b)the game isn't worth the candle./liliObama is weak, indecisive, and objectively pro-Ahmadinejad./liliObama is pro-Ahmadinejad./liliI don't really know anything about this, but any opportunity to criticize the Obama administration is worth taking. br //li/olThese groups are not mutually exclusive. Daniel "Go Ahmadinejad!" Pipes probably fits most comfortably into Group 5. Group 4 includes such luminaries of American punditry as a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OTM0NTQ2OTdlZTNjNTJjYjgxNzFkN2JkOGE3YTgxZjM="Andy McCarthy/a and Victor Davis Hanson. Group 3 is a touch harder to categorize, because it overlaps a lot with #2, but I'd say it's a view that's broadly shared across the wingnutosphere. Group 2, I think, includes Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, and some of the smarter folks at the Corner. Group 1 includes, once you cut through the manifest crazy, a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2221020/"Christopher Hitchens./a br /br /I think, thus far, that Obama has handled the situation fabulously well. I'm guessing that he believes that any US intervention will backfire, and that the US will need to talk to Iran in the future, whether or not Ahmadinejad remains President. I think he's definitely correct about the first. I also suspect that it is going to be extremely difficult to carry out any engagement strategy with Iran going forward. If the regime survives, it will be because of the a href="http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2009/06/tank-man-and-tank-commander.html"loyalty and brutality/a of its security forces. With that brutality on display on US televisions (a href="http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2009/06/befudddled.html"if only rarely/a) it will be much more difficult for Obama to build any domestic support for talks. Moreover, it's not clear that he should; knowing that the Iranian regime was repressive before these latest incidents, and acknowledging that many US allies in the region don't even bother with the fiction of elections doesn't change the fact that it's an ugly bit of business. I'd rather, other things being equal, not have my President engage with Iran while the current group of thugs is in power. Finally, I do think that the repression has opened greater opportunity for what might be termed a non-interventionist coercive strategy; this is to say that more and tougher sanctions against the regime are on the table now than was the case two weeks ago.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/7163938-3966819645216414984?l=lefarkins.blogspot.com'//div

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