Obama had no effect on what’s been happening in Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East. Instead, it’s the Bush Effect, doncha know!
“I think it’s fair to say the George Bush’s Freedom Agenda planted seeds that have started to grow in the Middle East,” Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer remarked in an e-mail to Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler on Sunday, responding to the huge turnout for Iranian reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. […]
Fleischer wrote that “one of the reasons there is a substantial reform movement in Iran — particularly among its young people — is because of George W. Bush’s tough policies.”
“A big push for reform is because of the desire of Iranians to get out from sanctions, to put an end to the country’s international ostracism,” Fleischer claimed, “because Shiites in particular see Shiites in Iraq having more freedoms than they do. Bush’s tough policies have helped give rise to the reformists and I think we’re witnessing that today.”
“Outreach to the people of Iran” also helped, Fleischer said, including State Department “people-to-people exchange programs.”
Is there nothing these people won’t say to try to make us forget what total jerkwads they were for eight long miserable years? Do they really believe Cheney’s threats and plans to attack Iran, possibly with tactical nuclear weapons have been forgotten, or that they played any role in promoting freedom? Do they think we’ll just forget that Bush had a chance to strike a deal with a moderate Iranian regime back in 2003 and Cheney rejected it out of hand, or that the Bush administration’s bellicosity toward Iran helped elect the more hard line conservative candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejehad as President in 2005?
I suppose they do. They really do think most Americans are morans.
It should be a surprise that a government built around opposing Bush would lose popularity once Bush was gone. So, Ari is right. People are sick and tired of all things Bush, even structure built to oppose him.
The only thing I thing I think Ari is right about is that efforts to strangle Iran’s economy worked to make Ahmadinejad less popular.
I think he took the right tone with his statement.
“Obama on Iran”
http://www.politico.com/politico44/wbarchive/whiteboard06152009.html
http://www.politico.com/politico44/wbarchive/whiteboard06152009.html
Ari is correct – it’s not the Obama effect it’s the Bush effect. The election of Obama was also the Bush effect, also known as “help, get us out of here!!!!!” (MORAN!!!!)
Seems to me that the people Republicans hate most are people just like themselves in other countries and the people that hate us the most in other countries are their Republicans.
re: your theory: I always understood GW Bush’s idea that Saddam wanted to kill his father in that light (a kind of Freudian interpretation as it were).
other possibility: people are sick of being threatened with the Bush/Cheney “freedom agenda”!!!!
Well, I don’t think this is either a Bush OR an Obama effect. When I was in Europe several years ago, I ran into a group of Iranian protestors asking America to stay out of their country so they could reform from within. They were passionate about bringing democracy, but didn’t want American help or interference. It was an interesting perspective.
You mean like our desire to reform our country from within? Interesting perspective indeed.
This is illustrative in some way of a propensity I’ve observed in Republicans over the past couple of decades but still can’t quite articulate.
It’s as if they believe — and I think most of them do honestly believe this — that if you can put it into a grammatically correct sentence and by careful selection of ambiguous words and a little equivocation make it sort of true when looked at from as contorted a position as necessary, then it is true.
I think the popular term for this is “truthiness”, but that really fails to convey what’s going on. There’s this wonderful obscure academic term, “reification”, which refers to treating purely conceptual entities as if they were real things out in the world — like “the will of the people” or “the white race” and such. The Republicans have actually built an ideology around reification: saying a thing is so, in their minds, molds reality. Or perhaps more accurately, there is no reality “out there”; the universe exists only as ideas in their pointy little heads.
This is an excusable position for, say, an art critic who lives in a world where everything important actually is made up. But for people who set public policy and have their hands on significant things out there, like nuclear weapons, it’s a recipe for disaster.
It is US exceptionalism and arrogance that wants to appropriate the events in Lebanon and Iran as elements of US discussions of foreign policy.
It was neither the Bush effect nor the Obama effect.
All politics is local first. The extralocal become shiny objects to distract people.
In both Lebanon and Iran, the events surrounding their elections happened because of internal domestic politics and very little else. For example, how would an American president fare if the US was seeing 25% inflation? Remember ole “Whip Inflation Now” Gerald Ford? And four years later, Jimmy Carter?
And if you were students or were actors in the 1979 revolution, what tactics would you first turn to? Ask some of the ole DFH’s who actually were in Chicago in 1968 what their first thoughts about Bush stealing the 2000 election were.
Whatever Lebanon and Iran point to in significance, it ain’t about us. Or US.
It is so sad, conservatives and neo-cons just can’t accept the fact that none of this is about us. The Iranian people are doing this for their country all by themselves. I am watching this all unfold on Twitter, it is just breath taking. 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall history is repeating itself (maybe) in Iran.