Maybe 'Change' Isn't All The Mideast Needs

Wishful Diplomacy: The president has delivered the Obama version of Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech. He doesn't seem to realize that big Mideast "change" might just end up being disastrous.

There is a big problem with what many observers will now surely call the Obama Doctrine, described by the president at the State Department on Thursday as a new U.S. policy of promoting "reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy," which "must also extend to nations where transitions have yet to take place."

Obama wasn't kidding in 2008, making "Change" his campaign slogan. Change is apparently always good.

But the lesson of Jimmy Carter's incompetent, human rights-based naivete masquerading as a foreign policy is that the "devil" you know is often better than his replacement. The Ayatollah Khomeini turned out to be far worse than the Shah of Iran — and his Islamofascist regime, now more than 30 years old, remains in power today, seeking nuclear weapons (see editorial below.)

Obama claimed "the people of the region have achieved more change in six months than terrorists have accomplished in decades." But we don't yet know what "change," particularly in Egypt, will mean.

The president claimed that "after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be."

What President Carter pursued, however, with the same good intent, wasn't what the U.S. got in the end.

It's nice to demand, as the president did, that Syria's anti-American ruling thug Bashar Assad "stop shooting demonstrators ... release political prisoners ... allow human rights monitors to have access to cities ... and start a serious dialogue to advance a democratic transition." But as with Iran and Libya, words and sanctions won't make President Obama's wishes come true.

And in the name of "credibility," wagging our finger at our friends and allies means little to anti-American dictators. Browbeating Yemen and Bahrain, as the president did Thursday — along with, of course, Israel — means nothing to Assad or Iran's mullahs.

Obama complained that "antagonism toward Israel" has become "the only acceptable outlet for political expression." But it's something he has encouraged with his harsh complaints against Israeli settlements — and, in Thursday's speech, by becoming the first U.S. president to insist on the indefensible 1967 borders as the starting point for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

He boasted that "in Iraq, we see the promise of a multiethnic, multisectarian democracy." But had Obama's advice been taken, Saddam Hussein would still be threatening the region and oppressing his people.

Mideast rulers who "take the risks that reform entails," he said, will now "have the full support of the United States." He promised, for example, to "relieve a democratic Egypt of up to $1 billion in debt." But what if the Muslim Brotherhood makes Egypt undemocratic?

Obama says "scenes of upheaval in the region may be unsettling, but the forces driving it are not unfamiliar."

But the forces driving change aren't always benevolent. Just ask those who thought things couldn't be worse than living under the czar or the shah.