Help Isn't Help If It Doesn't Help

Neoconservative Robert Kagan is accusing the Obama Administration of undercutting the Iranian election demonstrators, because he claims to believe that Obama is a Machiavellian realist on the issue of Iran who secretly wants to resume negotiations with a stabilized Ahmadinejad regime. Kagan makes this inference simply because Obama has kept relatively quiet on the subject of Iran, instead of engaging in the counterproductive saber-rattling of the previous Bush administration. The problem with this assumption is that Obama has just been praised by Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi for his relatively deft and diplomatic methods for handling the Iranian election crisis. The neoconservative approach typified by Kagan is fatally flawed, because it claims to help Iranian opposition, even though the Iranian opposition wants no part of the help that Kagan and his neoconservatives claim to provide. When you consider that Kagan's neoconservative colleague, Norman Podhoretz, favored bombing Iran as recently as 2007, the Iranian dissidents (who definitely might have been vaporized in any bombing raid on Iran) are more than warranted in rejecting neoconservative "help."