When an "appalled and outraged" President Obama on Tuesday condemned the brutal crackdown on Iranian protestors, it was a wholly justified statement with well-timed righteous moral indignation, not the intemperate outburst his critics wanted him to make days ago.
Obama kept a cool head as election results spelled out fraud in balloting and the counting. To have spoken out earlier would have given the ayatollahs and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad perfect grounds to accuse Washington of interfering in Iran's political affairs.
Instead, Iranian protestors ratcheted up their demands on the government and with the use of high-tech tweeting and cell-phone videos provided the outside world with the drama of a nation in revolt, sparked not by Washington but by Iranians. The video of the unspeakable sniper killing of Neda Agha Solton has given protestors a martyr to fuel their anger.
Once brutality began on Tehran streets, President Obama indeed had absolute justification for vilifying the government for violence against its own people.
Obama avoided repeating the impetuous President George H.W. Bush, who, in 1991 just a month into the Gulf War I, urged Iraqis and Kurds to revolt against Saddam Hussein. The rebellion began, but was crushed by Saddam with a ghastly toll of thousands killed. Bush did not back up his words with any U.S. military support.
Obama might well have heeded American author and editor Lewis Lapham's advice of years ago, when he said, "Leadership ... requires moral rather than athletic or intellectual effort and it imposes on both leader and follower alike the burdens of self-restraint."
