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

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been having a tough time with the current situation in Iran. He has been criticizing President Obama’s “hands off” approach and encouraging him to get more involved (despite expert opinion that says otherwise). But former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — a McCain supporter whom McCain recently called “the smartest man in the world” — said this week that he thinks Obama “has handled this well.”

Last night on Fox News, McCain and Sean Hannity joined in with the right wing’s Reagan-era hysteria, with Hannity arguing that Obama should offer “some moral support the way that Ronald Reagan offered moral support” to anti-communists. But in this instance, McCain got carried away, crediting Reagan for something that happened well before he became president:

McCAIN: You and I are both students of history and we’ve seen this movie before. When Ronald Reagan stood up for the workers in Gdansk in Poland, when he stood up for the people of Czechoslovakia, in Prague Spring, and America did. And some good Democrats did, too.

Watch it:

Perhaps McCain needs a new history lesson. The Prague Spring was a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia when Communist Party leader Alexander Dubcek allowed greater speech and assembly freedoms when he came to power… in January 1968. Ronald Reagan had just completed his first year as California’s governor at that time. Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded eight months later to end the reform movement.

Since the uprising in Iran over its disputed elections, conservatives of all stripes have been quick to invoke their hero Ronald Reagan as a guidepost from which to criticize Obama’s response (as they often do with just about any issue). But as Matt Duss noted, referring to McCain, “Indeed, we’ve all seen this movie before”:

It’s the one where conservatives deploy a potted history of the Cold War — in which Reagan spoke and the walls came tumbling down — to cast international politics as a zero-sum contest between good and evil, and to cow progressives into a more aggressive rhetorical posture toward America’s adversary of the moment. It is usually hidden under the guise of “solidarity with captive peoples” and absent any genuine consideration of the practical effects on the peoples concerned.

If McCain and company are going to continue to rely on Reagan for guidance, they should at least try to maintain the correct historical time-line.

Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio who is already facing a Department of Justice (DOJ) probe into his controversial immigration enforcement tactics “scoffs at the possibility that a federal civil rights and racial profiling investigation into his immigration raids and crime sweeps could be expanded into a broader look at his office’s use of power and finances,” according to the Phoenix Business Journal.

“I have nothing to hide. Let them look…They are just coming down here hoping to find something,” said Arpaio. However, it appears that federal officials might find more than Arpaio is willing to publicly admit. Maricopa County Supervisors already voted against accepting $1.4 million in state funding for Arpaio’s immigration enforcement. A Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles published in the East Valley Tribune chronicled the high cost associated with Arpaio’s immigration enforcement activities. According to the Tribune, the MCSO budget (excluding jails) nearly doubled from $37 million to $72.5 million since 2001. As of 2008, Arpaio’s office created a $1.3 million deficit in just three months. Meanwhile, crime rates are up and even the conservative Goldwater Institute has asked the state attorney general and Maricopa County attorney to investigate Arpaio’s office’s alleged practice of declaring unsolved crimes solved.

Arpaio took on the DOJ earlier this month when he accused officials of “not playing fair.” Arpaio has declared he won’t back down:

ARPAIO: Every law enforcement agency the DOJ has investigated in the past has bowed down or rolled over to the federal government. This agency and this Sheriff will not. Washington should not tell an elected Sheriff how to conduct his law enforcement responsibilities.

Arpaio will meet with Rev. Al Sharpton, who accused Arpaio of racial-profiling and called for his resignation, in a debate today. Last week, Arpaio forced his inmates to cook 5,000 pounds of beef liver for his birthday dinner.

In the midst of what is essentially a less skillful/more mendacious rewrite of Robert Kagan’s column from Tuesday, Charles Krauthammer daydreams about the Iranian demonstrations turning into “a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.”

Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited. [...]

[W]ith Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception — Iraq and Lebanon — becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.

First, a note of caution: I myself am also very interested in what a green victory could portend for political reform in region, but if the last years have taught us anything, it’s that when conservatives — particularly Charles Krauthammer — start to expound theories of Middle East transformation like this, people in the Middle East should start stocking up on water, food, and gasoline for their generators.

It’s clear from Krauthammer’s conflation of the Iranian regime with “Islamism” more broadly that’s he’s ignorant, or at least dismissive, of the diversity of Islamist thought, and of the role that Islamist thinkers and movements have and will continue to play in Middle East politics. It’s also clear from Krauthammer’s hailing of Iraq’s “young democracy” that he’s unaware that the main parties in power in Iraq — both Sunni and Shia — are themselves Islamist parties. (In regard to the lazy Communism=Islamism equation, I dealt with conservative attempts to shoehorn Iran into a tired Cold War narrative in The American Prospect yesterday.)

But here’s where I think Krauthammer really gives away the game:

The only hope for a resolution of the nuclear question is regime change, which (if the successor regime were as moderate as pre-Khomeini Iran) might either stop the program, or make it manageable and nonthreatening.

You’ll have noticed that no one in the street in Iran is calling for a return to the “moderate, pre-Khomeini” regime. That’s because the Shah’s regime in pre-Khomeini Iran was an oppressive, abusive authoritarian one, which regularly imprisoned, tortured, and executed its political opponents. It got so bad that, in 1979, they had this whole revolution over it. The Shah’s regime was “moderate” mainly in the sense that it was more amenable to U.S. hegemony in the region. Which, I guess, as far as Charles Krauthammer is concerned, is the point.

The fact that Krauthammer could claim the Shah’s regime as “moderate” while at the same time affecting solidarity with Iran’s “people in the street yearning to breathe free” bespeaks a real contempt for the principles he claims to espouse. Even as he excoriates the president (who, it bears repeating, continues to be praised by Iranian human rights activists for his prudence) for being “afraid to take sides,” Krauthammer himself has taken a side: The side of pure, naked American interest and power, brutally defined and unapologetically exercised. That’s a fair position to take, I suppose, but I just wish he would be honest about it, and stop disrespecting those risking their lives in Iran’s streets by using them as political props.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) and Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA) introduced a non-binding resolution yesterday “condemning the crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Iran.” Roll Call reports that it was “cleared for a Friday floor vote.” Pence, in recent days, has been all over cable news channels talking up his resolution, repeatedly insisting that it was motivated out a sense of loyalty to the “American cause of freedom.”

While the text of his resolution appears to offer unobjectionable support for Iranian freedoms, Pence is using bipartisan support of the resolution to criticize the Obama administration’s response to Iran.

On Fox News this morning, Pence repeated the pitch he’s made again and again on cable news in recent days: “We’ve yet to hear the President express the unqualified support of the American people for the people who are bravely going to the streets in Iran.” But despite his very public campaign for Obama to make such a statement, Pence admitted that he hadn’t actually talked to the President about how to best support the people of Iran:

PENCE: I haven’t talked to the President about it this week, but I do want to say that I think it’s a false choice to say that you can be either about engagement and or speak the ideals of the American people and our historic commitment to freedom. I think you can do both.

Later, Pence cited former President Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate as reason for Obama to combine tough pro-democracy talk with engagement. Watch it:

Despite Pence’s criticisms, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger endorsed Obama’s response. “I think the president has handled this well,” he said. Similarly, Iranian human rights activist and the Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi called Obama’s comments on Iran “sufficient” and said “what happens in Iran regards the people themselves, and it is up to them to make their voices heard.” Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) took a similar view, saying, “For us to become heavily involved in the election at this point is to give the clergy an opportunity to have an enemy and to use us, really, to retain their power.”

Pence also may want to consider how the demonstrators feel about the U.S. inserting itself into their struggle. Former Iran correspondent for Time magazine Azadeh Moaveni reported that there is “a resounding belief that this time the United States should keep out.” As for Pence’s criticism that the U.S. posture toward Iran should include Reagan-style pro-democracy rhetoric, Obama already has that covered. In his speech in Cairo earlier this month aimed, in part, at Iran, Obama declared:

America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights. And that is why we will support them everywhere.

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