Neutrality is something else in the eye of the beholder
Mark Steyn discusses the problems of appearing neutral in the matter of Iran:
For great powers, studied neutrality isn’t an option. Even if you’re genuinely neutral. In the early nineties, the attitude of much of the west to the disintegrating Yugoslavia was summed up in the brute dismissal of James Baker that America didn’t have a dog in this fight…
great-power “even-handedness” will invariably be received as a form of one-handedness by the time its effects are felt on the other side of the world. Western “even-handedness” on Bosnia was the biggest single factor in the radicalization of European Muslims…You always have a dog in the fight, whether you know it or not.
For the Obama administration, this presents a particular challenge — because the president’s preferred rhetorical tic is to stake out the two sides and present himself as a dispassionate, disinterested soul of moderation: “There are those who would argue…” on the one hand, whereas “there are those who insist…” on the other, whereas he is beyond such petty dogmatic positions…
in his recent speech in Cairo he applied the same technique. Among his many unique qualities, the 44th president is the first to give the impression that the job is beneath him — that he is too big and too gifted to be confined to the humdrum interests of one nation state. As my former National Review colleague David Frum put it, the Obama address offered “the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies.”…
What would you make of that “equidistance” if you were back in the palace watching it on CNN International?…they would have concluded that the meta-message of his “equidistance” was a prostration before “stability” — an acceptance of the region’s worst pathologies as a permanent feature of life.
The mullahs stole this election on a grander scale than ever before primarily for reasons of internal security and regional strategy. But Obama’s speech told them that, in the “post-American world,” they could do so with impunity.
Steyn observes that Obama’s use of opposing straw men is a rhetorical feint: “That was pretty much his shtick on abortion at Notre Dame…such studied moderation is usually a crock: Obama is an abortion absolutist, supporting partial-birth infanticide, and even laws that prevent any baby so inconsiderate as to survive the abortion from receiving medical treatment.” The appearance of being above it all conceals a rather clear agenda that can only be seen clearly in the actions or the inactions of Obama.
It seems apparent to us that, based on the administration’s inaction and feeble responses to the unbelievable events in Iran, it is reasonable to conclude that the administration is more or less siding with the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad faction. Certainly that is the conclusion that the Mousavi camp appears to have drawn.