Remember This?

President Obama spoke to the people of Iran before it was cool to do so.

This clip is from 3 months before the Iranian presidential election and was created to mark the Persian New Year of Nowruz. Iranians celebrate their new year at the beginning of Spring and it is the most important holiday in the country.

If you are a right-wing critic of the President, you probably don't remember this video because you were too busy advocating bombing the very people you now say you stand with when the clip came out. Yet I can tell you this clip was very important for Iranians, and friends that were in Iran have told me people were crying when they saw it.

The critics of the President who say he should speak out more forcibly against the regime seem to not understand the concept of targeting certain segments of the Iranian regime to achieve the best results. The people who would appreciate strong statements from the US probably don't need them because they are already strongly against the regime. Obama is really trying to win over the moderate to conservative elements in Iran that have the potential to turn against the regime because of its brutal and un-Islamic actions. This segment would still be weary of American intervention and might be hesitant to criticize the regime if it seems like the US is getting too involved.

However in this clip, this swing segment is precisely the group Obama was reaching out to before the unrest. Again those who like America probably enjoyed this clip, but did not need it. However, it is those moderate Iranians in the mold of Rafsanjani that Obama was really targeting. He wanted to convey a message that America is not the enemy and that it can be a partner to work with. This gesture in turn would cause those moderates away from the hardliners and towards the reformist who want greater engagement with the West. In other words, Obama knows when to speak out and when to be quite in order to persuade undecided Iranians to join the reformers.

Essentially, this is the opposite of what President Bush did when he labeled Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil" and grouped Iran with its arch enemy Saddam Hussein. That strategic failure drove the swing segment of the Iranian population towards the hardliners who argued that America could not be trusted and helped give rise to Ahmadinejad and his fiery rhetoric.

It is hard to tell the impact of Obama coming to power and this clip on the unrest in Iran, but I think it is no coincidence the biggest challenge in the history of the Islamic Republic to the hardliners in power came in the first six months of the Obama presidency. Hopefully this video will be seen as the starting point of a new era of US-Iran relations in the years to come.