President Obama is rightfully avoiding getting more directly involved publicly in the Iran election crisis, with the view that we don’t want the Iranian government uniting its citizens by making the United States the whipping boy which is promoting disunion and chaos. This is a time to let Iran’s hard line Islamic government deal with the crisis on its own, with the hope that there might be revolutionary change, but that it must come from within.
At the same time, many Republicans in Congress are now calling for more direct intervention and statements by the President in the name of promoting freedom, but of course, they forget that when President Eisenhower was in office, and the Hungarian Revolution was in process in 1956, he decided not to intervene more directly, in the name of trying to avoid Soviet Union allegations that we were promoting chaos and revolution. While that Hungarian revolution sadly was crushed, and with the reality that the Iranian revolution going on now might be crushed, Obama’s view is that ultimately we need to deal with whatever government emerges after this crisis, in order to promote the possibility of diplomacy to deal with the many issues that divide the US and Iran. This was the feeling that Eisenhower had 53 years ago, that promoting relations with the Soviet Union was the ultimate goal in promoting world peace.
So if Obama is following the lead of Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he cannot be seen as unwise!