Pushing Obama on democracy assistance

I have been devoting a lot of attention to democrats who are pressuring the Obama administration to take a firmer stance on supporting democratic movements abroad.  Today’s installment comes from the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier:

A few days before the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin, there occurred the thirtieth anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The dictators’ commemoration…was ruined by rallies of democrats and dissidents. Obama’s response was to intone wanly that ‘the world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice.’…Was the Soviet Union brought down by “witness”? We did not, on our own, bring the Soviet Union down…but we assisted keenly in its collapse. Are we assisting in the mullahs’ collapse? I think not…American support for the democracy movement in Iran…is also a strategic duty. Such support might indeed be “destabilizing,” but there is no stability in Iran anymore, there is only a vicious tyranny fighting for its life against a popular uprising that explains itself with principles that we, too, espouse.

I predict that the Obama administration will eventually come around to supporting democratic movements abroad more forthrightly (perhaps not in Iran), although I am less certain than Michael Allen at Democracy Digest that such changes are imminent.