How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy. by Ryan Lizza

During the peak of the protests in Iran, Jared Cohen, a young staffer at the State Department who worked for Slaughter, contacted officials at Twitter and asked the company not to perform a planned upgrade that would have shut down the service temporarily in Iran, where protesters were using it to get information to the international media. The move violated Obama’s rule of non-interference.

White House officials "were so mad that somebody had actually 'interfered' in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere," the former Administration official said. "Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. To the Secretary’s credit, she realized, I think, before other people, that this is ridiculous, that we had to change our line." The official said that Cohen "almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him."

Clinton did not betray any disagreement with the President over Iran policy, but in an interview with me she cited Cohen’s action with pride. "When it came to the elections, we had a lot of messages from people inside Iran and their supporters outside of Iran saying, 'For heaven’s sakes, don’t claim this as part of the democracy agenda. This is indigenous to us. We are struggling against this tyrannical regime. If you are too outspoken in our support, we will lose legitimacy!' Now, that’s a tough balancing act. It’s easy to stand up if you don’t worry about the consequences. Now, we were very clear in saying, 'We are supporting those who are protesting peacefully,' and we put our social-media gurus at work in trying to keep connections going, so that we helped to provide that base for communicating that was necessary for the demonstrations."

Failing to ask Twitter to not make the upgrade would have been, in effect, interfering on behalf of the Iranian regime.

The French and the British were shocked by the quick turn of events. Instead of the President announcing the Administration’s position from the East Room of the White House, the U.N. envoy quietly proposed transforming a tepid resolution for a no-fly zone into a permission for full-scale military intervention in Libya. Some officials thought it was a trick. Was it possible that the Americans were trying to make the military options appear so bleak that China and Russia would be sure to block action?

Gradually, it became clear that the U.S. was serious. Clinton spoke with her Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, who had previously told her that Russia would "never never" support even a no-fly zone. The Russians agreed to abstain. Without the cover of the Russians, the Chinese almost never veto Security Council resolutions. The vote, on March 17th, was 10-0, with five abstentions. It was the first time in its sixty-six years that the United Nations authorized military action to preëmpt an "imminent massacre." Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, wrote, "It was, by any objective standard, the most rapid multinational military response to an impending human rights crisis in history."

As the bombs dropped on Libyan tanks, President Obama made a point of continuing his long-scheduled trip to South America. He wanted to show that America has interests in the rest of the world, even as it was drawn into yet another crisis in the Middle East.

The key appears to be the Arab League's decision to get involved.

The Tyrants Strike Back by Juan Cole