Obama, Iran and Twittergate: J'accuse!

J'accuse! The cat is out of the bag.

This has nothing to with Donald Trump and the inanity involving Obama's birth certificate. Rather, this has everything to do with the duplicity of Obama's decision to abandon those who took to the streets of Iran during the 2009 Green Revolution, owing to the president's belief in his own omniscience.

This also has everything to do with further attempts by the Obama administration to depict another murderer, Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, as a "reformer", and Obama's delay in responding to the plaintive cries of those being gunned down in Daraa, Izraa and Homs.

Obama was sworn in as president on January 20, 2009, and exactly two months later, on March 20, 2009, he extended a new year's ("Nowruz") greeting to the Islamic Republic of Iran whereby he sought reconciliation with the mullahs:

"So in this season of new beginnings I would like to speak clearly to Iran's leaders. We have serious differences that have grown over time. My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community. This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.

You, too, have a choice. The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations. You have that right -- but it comes with real responsibilities, and that place cannot be reached through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization. And the measure of that greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.

So on the occasion of your New Year, I want you, the people and leaders of Iran, to understand the future that we seek. It's a future with renewed exchanges among our people, and greater opportunities for partnership and commerce. It's a future where the old divisions are overcome, where you and all of your neighbors and the wider world can live in greater security and greater peace."

This was all part of Obama's agenda to prove that there was a different way to approach the world's tyrannies, and that with kindness and humility they could be brought into the fold. Obama was determined to demonstrate the error in Bush's ways, that only he knew best, and that what had been deemed the "axis of evil" by the former president would, like the American electorate, succumb to his charm.

On June 4, 2009, still courting Iran and seeking to smooth out any remaining differences, Obama declared from Cairo:

“I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.”

During these same months, just by chance, Roger Cohen of The New York Times was busy writing innumerable op-eds from Tehran, disseminating the message that Iran is "not totalitarian".

During these same months, just by chance, The New York Times published two guest op-eds by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett seeking "a new approach toward Iran."

And if that was not enough, even the editorial board of The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/opinion/09mon1.html), as early as February 8, 2009 (only three weeks after Obama's inauguration), just by chance, got into the act and stated:

"President Obama has set a constructive new tone for trying to engage Iran. He told an Arabic-language TV network: 'If countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.' And he showed refreshing humility after the Bush administration’s arrogance: 'Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes.'”

Rapprochement with Iran was clearly the keystone of Obama's revolutionary foreign policy, and he was getting all the support from the press that he could possibly imagine.

But then came the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad in June 2009, when Iranian protesters took to the streets in what became known as the "Green Revolution" or "Twitter Revolution", owing to the reliance of the protesters upon Twitter and the Internet to communicate with one another. Brutally beaten, imprisoned, tortured and murdered, the protesters called out Obama's name from the streets of Tehran, but Obama ignored their pleas for help, refusing even to bring the matter before the United Nations.

Was Obama's failure to respond to the pleas of the Iranian protesters simply a matter of inexperience? Sadly, we are now learning that Obama's indifference to the Green Revolution was a calculated decision to adhere to his policy of currying favor with the mullahs, as evidenced by a New Yorker article entitled "The Consequentialist" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/02/110502fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all), written by Mr. Ryan Lizza:

"A week later [after Obama's Cairo speech], however, a disputed Presidential election in Iran triggered large demonstrations there, which were soon labelled the Green Revolution. For the first five months after his Inauguration, Obama had tried to engage with the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an effort to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Now he faced the choice between keeping his distance and coming to the aid of the nascent pro-democracy movement, which was rallying behind Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who had finished second behind Ahmadinejad. Obama chose to keep his distance, providing only mild rhetorical support. In an interview with CNBC after the protests began, he said that 'the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.'

During the peak of the protests in Iran, Jared Cohen, a young staffer at the State Department who worked for Slaughter, contacted officials at Twitter and asked the company not to perform a planned upgrade that would have shut down the service temporarily in Iran, where protesters were using it to get information to the international media. The move violated Obama’s rule of non-interference.

White House officials 'were so mad that somebody had actually ‘interfered’ in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere,' the former Administration official said. 'Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. . . . The official said that Cohen 'almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him.'”

Interviewed by Mr. Hugh Hewitt (http://www.hughhewitt.com/transcripts.aspx?id=daf95729-9b04-484a-acb3-6c834217a155) and as noted by Mr. Rick Richman of Commentary in an "Contentions" item entitled "Leading from Behind 2.0" (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/04/27/leading-from-behind-2-0/), Mr. Ryan Lizza further explained in this regard:

"I was very surprised to find that this young guy, Jared Cohen, who unilaterally, essentially all by himself, contacted Twitter, and told them to delay a scheduled maintenance upgrade so that the Iranians could continue to use Twitter. It was a very controversial, I mean, inside, someone at the White House referred to it as, when I asked about it, they said oh yeah, you’re talking about Twittergate, right?"

Needless to say, Obama's refusal to support the protesters did not earn him any credit with Ahmadinejad or Khameini.

But that did not prevent Obama from persisting in his ways and seeking to win over Syria. He repeatedly sent Kerry to Damascus. He ignored the murder of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri by Assad in 2005 and appointed a new ambassador to Syria. He ceded Lebanon to Hezbollah. Notwithstanding the murder of protesters, Hillary saw fit to refer to Assad as a reformer, and now Obama has allowed Europe to take the lead in condemning the massacre of unarmed civilians.

Obama has proven himself a prisoner of his own narcissism and conceit, incapable of remorse, and unable to acknowledge his errors, which continue to exact a high toll of innocent bloodshed, but which go ignored by his fawning admirers.