Obama’s Catalog Of Universal Rights
The president’s news conference this afternoon provides much food for thought (transcript here). The president has been very careful until now about asserting that democracy and human rights are universal values. Yet today, he said once, and then repeated twice that:
As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech.If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people. It must govern through consent and not coercion.
Obama’s language today was much more forceful than it was in Cairo. The biggest change, however, is Obama’s insistence that the international community’s respect for Iran depends directly on its acceptance of the Iranian people’s universal rights.
There was absolutely no suggestion in Cairo that a democratic deficit is grounds for exclusion from the international community. Yet now Obama has taken a position increasingly reminiscent of his predecessor, whose name escapes me at the moment.
It is also worth observing which right the President did not attribute to the people of Iran. Although he spoke extensively in Cairo about freedom of religion, he made no reference to it today. Perhaps that was unintentional, or perhaps it reflected the belief that demanding freedom of religion from a theocratic dictatorship would be too provocative.
In conclusion, let me just say “bravo” to President Obama.
Cross-posted at Conventional Folly
6 Responses to “Obama’s Catalog Of Universal Rights”
There's no need for the Republicans to be outraged at Obama (feebly imitating liberal Outrage! [tm]) and tossing cheap shots at him, and there's no need for the lefties to be obscessed with the strife in Iran, much less think that they have “adopted” or “own” it (they're hardly in a morally superior position within Western society), or play PC-techno-toy games of obscession with Twitter and other newer media.
Iran is experiencing internal problems, has experienced a questionable election, is seeing riots and a catharsis among the citizens, especially among the post-Revolutionary younger crowd, and there is no way to know how this will end, and little we can or should do, and we have to calm down, grow up, and wait and see how this is resolved.
There's no need to obscess about this, and no need for so many threads about the same thing on here.
I completely disagree. We should not wait and see. We should let the friends of democracy in Iran know that the world is watching. As we learned from Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel and other brave dissidents during the Cold War, encouragement from the free world is essential.
What can or should we (the USA, its government) do, short of invading the country and removing the existing regime? What can we do that is _substantial_ as opposed to merely, fluffily symbolic? The Iranian people already know we're sympathetic to them (they have long known we don't like their current government) and they know we are receiving information outside normal channels from them, and in fact we have been communicating with them. Words already have been said, and done their realistic most.
Never discount the fluffily symbolic! As Jimmy Carter once said, “In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.”
Perhaps the regime will still crush the uprising. Then Obama can get to work on showing that he meant it when he said Iran's status in the international community will depend on how it treats its own people.
David,
“Never discount the fluffily symbolic!”
I've not wrongfully devalued it, but I also admonish people not to give it more than it is due.
To continue addressing the language you used, it and its value have already been accounted for in the “market” (of ideas as well as news).
David,
I'll give you an example of substance I was moved to consider (and I still consider it) since Obama's speech in Cairo. It's a small amount of substance compared to how far there is to go related to it, but it's a true start and a true change for the better.
He was not only trying to calm down an ignorant and at-times neurotic population, but he actually did challenge them (as opposed to being the “apologist” rightist critics accused him of being) by acting on what they routinely discuss (because they are facts) behind closed doors.
Bearing this in mind, along with his addressing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (he was inaccurate to put Israel into effectively the same moral position as its enemies, and wrong to bluntly and openly reveal his administration's excessive demands of Israel, weaking its negotiating power and position), he has given the people there a challenge to be more honest and make progress toward peace.
The Nobel Peace Prize is hugely tarnished of leftist politics in what it routinely is awarded for, and why. We saw that not only when it was awarded to Jimmy Carter as a childish slap at Bush after launching the war in Iraq, but most recently with Al Gore and rewarding his perverse celebrity based on irreponsible hype and alarmism and association with the worst of the environmentalist activist pathology related to climate and “climate change.”
Now let us consider Obama, a lefty, subject to a lot of valid (as well as invalid) criticism. His foreign policy threatens still to be naive or against US interests at least in sentiment (a Sixties legacy that harms the USA to this day).
But consider his speech and his challenge to _everyone_ (not only Israel) in the Middle East.
What if Obama led an effort that merely began a peace process, but a _serious_ peace process marked by _serious_ accomplishments? The example best possible to name would be formal recognition by the Arabs (and later by Iran) of Israel.
Merely getting Israel to be recognized is a true, serious, _substantial_ achievement, as small as it is on the way to complete peace and advanced development of Israel's neighbors (outside the scope merely of the Palestine “question”).
If Obama engineered talks or a process that led to Israel's formal recognition by the Arabs, Obama would deserve the next Nobel Peace Prize afterward, and that prize would actually be worth something this time.