Obama’s hands-off policy is just the right touch

Oh yes, I remember it well! Angry young demonstrators, disillusioned with their society, demonstrating on the streets of Iran. Day after day after day against a “repressive” and “unrepresentative” government. Shouting in Farsi, “Death to injustice!” and (never forgetting) “God is great!” Actually yearning for a few deaths to rally around.
 

But then I think twice and wonder, “Are my memories playing tricks on me?” For I am thinking about that bitter winter of 1979, and the protestors on the streets of Tehran were demonstrating against the modern changes that the shah had been putting in place.
 

Think of the irony that faces us in today’s headlines. As Dr. Henry Kissinger remembered the shah in his classic book, “White House Years,” the problem was not that the pro-Western leader was not providing for his people, but that he was doing too much: He “modernized too rapidly.” The doomed Shah of Iran totally bought the flawed Western idea that economic progress would lead inevitably to political stability.
 

In my visits to the country throughout the 1970s, one could feel the nervous reverberations of too much indigestible change. The shah had brought young men from the villages -- boys he uprooted from every security they had ever known -- and put them to work on the oil-rich country’s omnipresent construction projects. Then he cut off the latently powerful mosques from power, thus radicalizing the Islamic theocracy and making radical Islam seem “revolutionary.”
 

By the late 1970s, the country was a social and religious match ready to be lit, and when the Ayatollah Khomeini, the “supreme leader” of the most radically Islamic parts of the country, returned from exile in Iraq, the country exploded in an Islamic revolution that soon threatened the entire Middle East.
 

I remember the impression the revolution -- which more correctly might be called a “retrogression” to earlier times -- had on the Palestinians. I had an interview with PLO leader Yasser Arafat at 2 a.m. in his office in Beirut, when he had just returned from the massive and hysterical demonstrations in Tehran welcoming Khomeini back home. Arafat seldom said anything really coherent to Westerners, but this time, he was clearly enamored with what he had experienced. He repeated several times, his eyes strangely far away: “I sat up there with him ... I sat up there with him ... and the crowds were down there ... and the crowds....”
 

And, now? Well, as my beloved mother liked to say, “Will wonders never cease?” For while the patterns of the demonstrations are similar, this time it is largely the educated and middle classes who are demonstrating against a now decadent and oppressive Islamic state. They are tired of the religious edicts that define every move, tired of women in black robes, and tired of the ramblings of their president, the strange working-class veteran of the savage 1980s war against Iraq, the anti-Western and anti-Semitic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
 

But in fact, he is no more surprising as a leader of the Iran of recent years than the shah was of his Iran. “As much as some Americans and Iranians wanted to see Ahmadinejad as a member of a lunatic fringe,” the perceptive foreign correspondent Barbara Slavin wrote in her book “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies,” “he represented a potent constituency among the second generation of regime loyalists: those who came from humble backgrounds, did not see the United States as a political or social model to be emulated, and who regarded Iran as a country much more sinned against than sinning.”
 

As of this writing, the supreme Islamic leaders who still rule the country say that Ahmadinejad was re-elected by a landslide. But nobody seems to be counting the votes (a habit that I, as a devout Chicagoan, cannot totally discount!). But the country has changed in 30 years. The young are communicating through Facebook and Twitter and the Web. The supreme leaders can pen up the foreign correspondents, but to what end? There are just too many ways to communicate today, and the young are not only angry, they are also curious and they are capable.
 

Their “hero” is one as ambivalent as the age they find themselves in, but they like his style. The opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was a major player in that original Islamic revolution of 1979. But for 20 years he has played little role in the country -- and, unlike the open-shirted, often incoherent Ahmadinejad, he is a well-dressed and respectable intellectual, a man who loves music and poetry, all of which endears him to the young, who want their modern Persian homeland to reflect some of the beauty of its ancient history.
 

Most important to the West, Mousavi says that, while the country’s nuclear program is not negotiable, its possible applications are.
 

And the American role in all of this? President Obama again has effectively chosen exactly the right policy. To interfere, he said wisely, would “not be productive.” Given the history of American relations with Iran, “it would be seen as meddling.”
 

The man understands not only the exactness of historical events, like the U.S. conniving with the British in 1953 to overthrow the reformer Mohammed Mossadegh in order to avoid the nationalization of Iran’s oil (which was eventually unsuccessful, anyway). Obama has shown once again that he also understands tone -- he is respectful of Iran, but without losing his respect for himself and for his own country.
 

Letting events play out without our meddling has not always been the strong suit of American leaders. Finally we have one who understands that cautious watchfulness can, in its own way, be the most active and even aggressive policy possible. 
 
* Georgie Anne Geyer has delivered distinctive foreign commentary from a variety of foreign fronts for more than 30 years.

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