Obama Advisors Take Credit for Iranian Demonstrations

I wish I had been wrong about this but in my article yesterday I explained how Obama supporters and the administration would take credit if the Iranian protests succeeded in overthrowing the government there.  Seems I wasn’t pessimistic enough in my thinking… they are taking credit for the protests before there’s even a result!

Check out this article in the Washington Post:

Since taking office, Obama has argued that reclaiming America’s moral authority by ending torture and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay provides essential diplomatic leverage to influence events in such strategic parts of the world as the Middle East and Central Asia. The speech he delivered to the Islamic world in Cairo eights days before the June 12 Iranian election sought to do that by providing what the president saw as an unvarnished accounting of U.S. policy in Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But privately Obama advisers are crediting his Cairo speech for inspiring the protesters, especially the young ones, who are now posing the most direct challenge to the republic’s Islamic authority in its 30-year history.

One senior administration official with experience in the Middle East said, “There clearly is in the region a sense of new possibilities,” adding that “I was struck in the aftermath of the president’s speech that there was a connection. It was very sweeping in terms of its reach.”

That’s the thing about rhetoric… you can bend, twist, and contort it into anything you want so you come out on top.  It’s sort of like that massive waste of taxpayer resources we call the “stimulus.”  If the economy gains jobs it’s because of the stimulus… if it loses jobs it would have been worse without it so, either way, Obama was right!

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