Telling Iran How Naughty It Is

The House of Representatives voted 405 to 1 to tell Iran it was being very, very badly behaved. Shame, shame, shame, 405 times. Along with the vote went a fair amount of criticism of President Obama for not having castigated Iran himself.
Certainly I have a great deal of sympathy for the young voters of Iran who were so completely robbed of their votes. What’s going on offends every democratic impulse most of us have. Armed thugs break into student dormitories and beat sleeping students.
That’s not reaction to a riot. That’s a government inspired riot. A lot of what’s going on over there is purely evil—a repressive regime clamping down on its own citizenry in response to an attempt to create a more responsive and Democratic society. We’re all for that.
But what does a vote in the House of Representatives accomplish toward that end? Quite bluntly, it’s talking loudly and carrying no stick at all. All too often, American preachments are a lot of hot air with nothing behind it. That can be deadly.
Memory takes me back to the early 1950s. Officials from the President on down talked loudly about “liberating captive Eastern Europe”—the Soviet bloc. We held public demonstrations, Congress passed resolutions and our officials made stern protests.
We never stopped to think that some people in Eastern Europe might take us seriously. In October, 1956, thousands of Hungarians suddenly rose and ten year old kids began pelting Russian tanks with Molotov cocktails. The Russians, momentarily overwhelmed, fell back and abandoned Budapest.
The Hungarians went wild with joy. Pictures on the covers of our news magazines showed Hungarian secret police being machine gunned by newly liberated partisans. We cheered. Then the Russians turned around and came back—with the new T-54 tanks designed to be Molotov cocktail proof.
Hungarians expected our verbiage to mean something. They had risen in hope of American help—now they called for it desperately. But President Eisenhower was sitting on a military analysis that recommended that we could and would do nothing to help.
Russians vetoed any action by the United Nations—and the revolutionaries in Hungary found themselves facing massive Russian reinforcements on their own. A few thousand died, a couple of hundred thousand fled west into neutral Austria.
All of our words and resolutions were just that—words. Words that were of very little use against Russian tanks and troops. I suppose the one good thing that came out of the aborted Hungarian Revolution was that nobody in Eastern Europe ever took us seriously again. There were no more casualties caused by empty American talk.
That’s what the 405 to 1 resolution passed in the House amounts to. Empty American talk. And they are angry that Obama isn’t joining in. He’s being sensibly quiet. He hasn’t said or done anything that might suggest to some hot headed Iranian students that substantive American help is at all likely.
(That will keep a lot of them alive.) He hasn’t said or done anything to make the Iranian Regime feel it has to retaliate drastically to protect itself from the “Great Satan”. (That will help keep the government crackdown somewhat restrained—at least it won’t make it any worse.)
But Congress seems to have learned nothing from the tragic results of our toothless posturing in the 1950s. They want to pour more and more inflammatory words onto the fire—a fire we have no intention of doing anything whatsoever to put out.
First of all we haven’t got the extra divisions of troops it would take to quell the Iranian armed forces. We have full plates in Iraq and Afghanistan. (We’re not likely to stir up a hornet’s nest by transporting Israeli troops to do the job for us. That’s the only imaginable source of additional troops we could call upon.)
Secondly of all the United States manifestly lacks the political will to open another major front in the so-called “war on terror”. Can you imagine that same House of Representatives authorizing an extra ten or so divisions of troops (perhaps a draft?) and a third full scale war? Or the people who voted them into power going for this?
Thirdly, we honestly don’t have the money to afford another war. The billions it costs to operate in Iraq and Afghanistan are draining us quite enough now. Where are we going to get the additional billions for a fight in Iran.
And that’s what it would take—if we want to do more than talk—enough troops to force a recount of last week’s election. A lot more body bags, and millions more enemies to shoot at us. (The Iranians would quickly see American intervention—however kindly motivated—as just another invasion, and they would resist it. Just as they resisted Iraq and its poison gas in 1981.)
So we aren’t going to do anything but talk. We’d better be very sure we aren’t going to get a lot of Iranian students and moderates killed with it. A destabilized Iran isn’t going to make anyone a bit safer in the Middle East.
There’s an old saw about words being cheap. Not entirely true—especially if they are ill-advised and entirely empty. They can be really expensive in that case.