Feckless and reckless: the U.S. stands for little and still benefits naught

http://tinyurl.com/mscjk5
Obama Erases Pro-Democracy Money for Iran By: Kenneth R. Timmerman Even as Ayatollah Khamenei blasted the United States for fomenting unrest in a defiant Friday prayer address in Tehran, President Obama has kept silent, ...spent more time with TV personality Stephen Colbert... than he did addressing the turmoil in Iran this week. Newsmax has learned that the Obama administration also has zeroed out funding for pro-democracy programs inside Iran from the State Department budget for fiscal 2010, just as protests in Iran are ramping up. Funding for pro-democracy programs began in 2004, when Congress earmarked $1.5 million ...ramped up dramatically two years later, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested $75 million for pro-democracy programs. More than half of the $66.1 million Congress finally appropriated went to expand U.S. government-funded Persian language broadcasting services at Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty....no money has been earmarked for such programs in the administration’s fiscal 2010 foreign operations budget request....doubted that a Democrat-controlled Congress would add it when the budget comes before a committee next week....pro-(Iranian)regime lobbying groups, such as the National Iranian-American Council, urging the State Department to cancel the funding....State Department desk officers intervened to block funding for any projects other than cultural exchanges and “think tanks and studies,” ...One key opponent of the funding, ... was Suzanne Maloney, who is now at the Brookings Institution. Speaking at a Washington forum that the National Iranian-American Council sponsored Wednesday, Maloney applauded President Obama’s do-nothing policy. “The best thing we can do for Iranian democracy is sit back and let Iranians fight it out for themselves,” she said, echoing the president’s own words...the efforts of people such as Maloney inside the State Department to blunt the original intent have made the funding virtually meaningless.
...Katzman, the analyst who wrote the research service's Iran report, told Newsmax that the programs “suffered from finding few participants” inside Iran who were willing to be seen as taking U.S. government money....Robert Gibbs...about the president’s “hands-off approach,...said there was “no debate in the White House” over how to address the events in Iran.
“Everybody is on the same page. There’s no difference of opinion....Earlier, the White House and the State Department dismissed Iranian government claims that it was interfering in the election. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reinforced the administration’s “hands-off” policy in a statement to reporters on Wednesday. “It is for the Iranians to determine how they resolve this internal protest concerning the outcome of the recent election,” she said. At the same time, Clinton defended the phone call by a 27-year old State Department staffer to the CEO of Twitter, urging him to delay scheduled maintenance work to ensure that the social networking service remained available for use by Iranians without interruption.****One must wonder if the 27-year-old acted on her own initiative. Surely SOMEONE in the White House must see that non-interference and non-mention is morally bankrupt and unavailing since the Iranians are going to blame the U.S., Britain and Israel, anyway. The whole policy of eschewing "regime change" enunciated by Clinton and Kerry (as emissary) takes away the only mechanism to combat evil regimes ( although Obamanables would argue that there is no "evil" but merely a different viewpoint --except, of course, when it comes to the Israelis.)****
http://tinyurl.com/kvpwfv
GOP senator says Obama 'timid, passive' over Iran AP By STEVEN R. HURST WASHINGTON – Republican senators criticized President Barack Obama on Sunday for not taking a tougher public stand in support of Iranians protesting the outcome of the country's contested presidential election, with one saying the president had been "timid and passive." Obama...has sought to send a measured message to the Iranian leadership, with which he still hopes to open a dialogue over its nuclear program.****Sure, you can certainly trust Ahmadinejad after this ( if you were stupid enough to trust him before!).**** "The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free world, not follow it," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C...."He's been timid and passive more than I would like."...Obama has been stiffening his response while trying to avoid giving Iran's theocratic leadership the opportunity to blame the U.S. for the unrest that has swept the country since the June 12 vote.****But they have blamed the U.S., anyway and can have been expected to do so.It's only the rebels who know the U.S. is "innocent" of supporting them.****...Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has put himself in the center of the dispute by warning that the leadership would not tolerate further demonstrations and unrest in the street. Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind....said Khamenei had pushed the conflict toward a "very brutal outcome"... Democrats in the Senate say Obama has struck the right balance....emphasizing Obama's longer-term goal of engaging Iran over its nuclear program....Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, voiced disappointment at the overall administration response to the chaos that has gripped some Iranian cities."If America stands for democracy and all of these demonstrations are going on ... obviously they are going to ask, do we really care about our principles?" Grassley said...