It's the Economy, Mullah Obama's Iranian Mess The New Workers' Ring

A mere several months after its introduction Barack Obama’s pretentious foreign policy is a shambles.

First came Kim Jong Il’s nuclear blast in North Korea, and made a laughingstock of his previous commitment to shelve Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Obama's fighting spirit, which it was meant to test, has yet to be displayed.

Then came the Arab world’s response to Obama’s speech in Cairo, which boiled down to hearing well every one of the few words he had to dedicated to Israel, and nothing of the volumes he spoke about the destitution, oppression and chauvinism that remain rife throughout the Arab world. Yes, the speech made Benjamin Netanyahu move, and that's good. But Netanyahu's response was summarily met with a pan-Arab refusal to recognize Israel's right tobe a Jewish state, thus effectively telling Obama that his entire speech's spirit was lost on them.

And now comes the turmoil in Iran, and leaves Obama with the most embarrassing situation: On the one hand, his promise to dialogue with the Islamist Republic has been a pillar of his diplomacy. On the other hand, doing so now would mean purifying what has just been established as the international system’s supreme political profanity.

For true democrats, the Iranian crisis leaves no room for ambiguity.

True, Ahmedinejad’s rivals are no Vaclav Havels or Andre Sakharovs; they too are Islamist zealots, who passed the Mullahs’ eligibility test before being allowed to run in last weekend’s presidential election. Yet Ahmedinejad has emerged as a fraudster, a sour loser who wasted a precious half decade in power provoking not only the outer world, from Canada to Bahrain, but the Iranian nation itself.

This is what the masses who are right now taking to the streets of Tehran are effectively screaming, from the depths of their soar throats and at an enormous personal risk. Evidently, they no longer care. No, it’s not that they care much about Holocaust denial, Lebanese intrigues, Gazan missiles gay's persecution or the rest of the causes that have been dear to Ahmedinejad; they just want jobs, goods, price stability and a better chance to get ahead in life. Instead, they got from Ahmedinejad an international siege complemented by a broken economy that by design obstructs personal empowerment, lest the mobility that would produce will later generate a challenge to the clerics’ grip on power.

The speedy announcement of a landslide, following a close contest in a vast country whose vote counting should have lasted at least a day, made it plain that the regime had what to hide, and that it had lost what little respect it still had for its own people’s intelligence, rights and power. Some in the West always believed that sooner or later the refusal to be bullied, abused and robbed makes people rebel. Such Westerners, even if they can’t literally interfere in behalf of the abused, at least make a point of keeping their abusers at arms length. That is what George W. Bush did, to the scorn of self-styled pragmatists from the same school that used to ask what use would it be to protest the East Bloc’s oppression, while there was so much business to do there peacefully.

Well now the Iranian people are speaking up, and one of the many things they are effectively demanding is: “Mr. Obama: Don’t dialogue with that man.” And really, what American leader in his right mind can sit and talk with this smalltime vote thief? Even if Obama can afford such a dialogue electorally, which also remains to be seen, he certainly can’t afford it morally.

The drama in Iran has yet to end, and chances that it will end happily from a Western viewpoint are low. Still, there already is enough in it to remind Obama that his eagerness to brandish a diplomacy markedly different from his predecessor’s was hasty, naïve, unfair, and dangerous, too. The least he can now do is suspend the dialogue with Iran until its election is proven agreeable to its own people. Such an announcement would not only shorten the distance between the Mullahs and history’s dustbin, it would send a clear message to the brave Iranians who took to the streets in their quest for freedom: “America is with you.”