Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

President Obama’s measured response to Iran’s pro-democracy demonstrations has driven conservatives crazy. With the notable exceptions of Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, many conservatives are rending their garments and gnashing their teeth at the president’s cautious response. Robert Kagan went so far as to accuse President Obama of “siding with the Iranian regime”; House Republicans compared themselves to Iranian protestors; and a number of conservatives have spoken as if Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric alone –- and not Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new thinking” or the human rights activism of Eastern European dissidents –- was responsible for ending communist rule in Eastern Europe.

All of this overheated grandstanding over to the Iranian protests has exposed a deeply silly strain of contemporary conservativism. Stunts like comparing their vacuous Twittering to the use of technology to organize demonstrations by Iranian protesters or calling President Obama a “cream puff” are juvenile to most observers.

But the height of conservative inanity during the protests has been the almost narcissistic focus on American action -– in particular being “steadfast” (in what?) and assuming that Iranian protesters “await just a word that America is on their side.” Because obviously people can’t act unless they know where the United States stands in bright, screaming neon letters. This particular silliness is tied in with the previously mentioned misreading of the end of the Cold War, in which conservatives believe that Reagan’s speechifying caused the end of communism.

What the particular silliness that is the conservative response to the Iranian protests reveals is the more fundamental moral and intellectual bankruptcy of conservative foreign policy thinking. There is apparently little more to it than sloganeering, where somehow the utterance of words by the United States magically transforms their sentiments into action. Rather than thinking through what the United States’ interests, ideals, and objectives are and how best to obtain them, conservatives have decided that it’s enough to simply shout what we want at the top of our lungs and demand the world bend to our wishes. It’s as though conservative foreign policy thinking amounts to nothing more than the applied power of positive thinking. Read more

Last month in the Washington Examiner, former House speaker Newt Gingrich denounced President Obama’s supposed plot to “release trained terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay into American suburbs.” The men he was so afraid of are innocent Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, who have since been released in Bermuda after spending seven years locked up in Guantanamo. According to 2008 State Department Human Rights report, these men faced “severe cultural and religious repression” at the hands of the Chinese government. In 2001, they stayed in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan and “were later turned in to the authorities by Pakistani villagers in return for an American bounty,” even though were never a security threat.

However, in his column, Gingrich said they posed a “paramount threat and “have been allied with and trained by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups.” In an interview with Fox News, Gingrich added that the United States should just send them back to China.

One of Gingrich’s Republican colleagues is now calling out his ignorance. At a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Human Rights on Tuesday, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) said that Gingrich belongs in the “hall of shame” for fear-mongering about the Uighurs. He also said that the Bush administration unjustly detained these men at the bidding of the Chinese government in a “pathetic” attempt to gain the country’s support for the Iraq war:

The Bush administration…held Uighurs in Guantanamo as terrorists, and they did this, I believe, to appease the Chinese government in a pathetic attempt to gain its support at the beginning of the war against Iraq, and also to ensure China’s continued purchase of U.S. treasuries. Many, if not all, the negative allegations against the Uighurs, can be traced by to Communist Chinese intelligence, whose purpose is to snuff out a legitimate independence movement that challenges the Communist party bosses in Beijing. [...]

In the hall of shame, of course, is our former speaker, Newt Gingrich. His positioning on this should be of no surprise — and is of no surprise — to those of who, during Newt’s leadership, were dismayed by his active support for Clinton-era trade policies with Communist China.

Watch it:

Through their translator, the Uighurs have expressed dismay at Gingrich’s ignorant remarks. “How could he speak in such major media with nothing based in fact?” related the translator. As many human rights experts noted, the Uighurs would likely have been tortured if returned to China, as Gingrich had hoped.

Transcript: Read more