AJAMI ON OBAMA - AT 8:52 A.M. ET:  The great Fouad Ajami, in another stellar piece in The Wall Street Journal, gets to the heart of the American response to the Iranian convulsion - the mentality and inexperience of the man who said "Yes we can," but is now saying, "Well, maybe we can."

President Barack Obama did not "lose" Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America's 44th president has just begun. Hitherto, he had been cavalier about other lands, he had trusted in his own biography as a bridge to distant peoples, he had believed he could talk rogues and ideologues out of deeply held beliefs. His predecessor had drawn lines in the sand. He would look past them.

We see how far that's gotten us.

But in truth Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For the length of three decades, the custodians of the theocracy have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted -- just enough to be an ideological glue for the regime but not enough to be a threat to their power.

The heart of it:

That ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. We had tried to "cheat" -- an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers' cynicism and utter disregard for their people's intelligence and common sense -- and we were caught at it.

Ajami, unlike Obama, actually knows history, and doesn't depend on speechwriters to give him his facts.

Days into his presidency, it should be recalled, Mr. Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier. It so happened that he was speaking, almost to the day, on the 30th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution -- and that the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver.

Ajami hits on something that's a sore point with many of us - the acceptance by the mainstream media of the notion that Obama is somehow this very deep intellectual sent to us by Heaven to enlighten our ignorant souls.  I concede that Obama is bright, but that's the extent of it.  He's not an intellectual man, nor is he a well-read man.  He knows little of the past, and it's clear that his ideas, to the extent he has any, are undeveloped and untested.  In many respects, he's a classic example of the notion that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  (Reader Bruce Goldman remarks, "Here in Richmond, there's a colorful expression for that:  He knows just enough to be dangerous.")  

Finally...

Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter, another American president convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its "inordinate fear of communism," and to put aside its concern with "traditional issues of war and peace" in favor of "new global issues of justice, equity and human rights." We had betrayed our principles in the course of the Cold War, he said, "fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is quenched with water." The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979.

Mr. Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory.

Iran's ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama's Persian tutorial has just begun.

COMMENT:  This is one of the best pieces on the Obama presidency that I've read.  Ajami is on the mark.  The tragedy here is that, while Obama's Persian tutorial has just began, this is not a man who learns easily, and he seems to have no great moral core. 

Say what you wish about George W. Bush, and there's good and bad, but the man had fundamental principles.  True, he wavered in those ideals during his second term, under the false tutelage of his father's advisers, but those principles guided his original foreign policy.  I suspect his stock will begin to rise, even over the objections of The New York Times and NBC News.

But now we have Obama, a man who has faced his initial crises in foreign policy with his usual self-confidence, and his usual narrowness.  Like Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, he's a man of elegant words and shallow thoughts.  He must do better.  There will come a point where even Chris Matthews cannot save him.

June 22, 2009