The protests in Iran have entered a third week and the state media acknowledges that the death toll has reached 19 and that hundreds have been injured. Fareed Zakaria, a man not noted for idle leaps, proclaims, “we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy.”

In an interview with CNN, he explains:

No, I don’t mean the Iranian regime will fall soon. It may — I certainly hope it will — but repressive regimes can stick around for a long time. I mean that this is the end of the ideology that lay at the basis of the Iranian regime.

The regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, laid out his special interpretation of political Islam in a series of lectures in 1970. In this interpretation of Shia Islam, Islamic jurists had divinely ordained powers to rule as guardians of the society, supreme arbiters not only on matters of morality but politics as well. When Khomeini established the Islamic Republic of Iran, this idea was at its heart. Last week, that ideology suffered a fatal wound.

When the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a “divine assessment,” he was indicating it was divinely sanctioned. But no one bought it. He was forced to accept the need for an inquiry into the election. The Guardian Council, Iran’s supreme constitutional body, met with the candidates and promised to investigate and perhaps recount some votes. Khamenei has subsequently hardened his position but that is now irrelevant. Something very important has been laid bare in Iran today — legitimacy does not flow from divine authority but from popular support.

As for the United States,

I would say continue what we have been doing. By reaching out to Iran, publicly and repeatedly, President Obama has made it extremely difficult for the Iranian regime to claim that they are battling an aggressive America bent on attacking Iran. In his inaugural address, his New Year greetings, and his Cairo speech, there is a consistent effort to convey respect and friendship for Iranians. That is why Khamenei reacted so angrily to the New Year greeting. It undermined the image of the Great Satan that he routinely paints in his sermons. In his Friday sermon, Khamenei said that the United States, Israel, and especially the United Kingdom were behind the street protests, an accusation that will surely sound ridiculous to most Iranians. The fact that Obama has been cautious in his reaction makes it all the harder for Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to wrap themselves in a nationalist flag.

I think a good historic analogy is President George H.W. Bush’s cautious response to the cracks in the Soviet empire in 1989. Then, many neo-conservatives were livid with Bush for not loudly supporting those trying to topple the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But Bush’s concern was that the situation was fragile. Those regimes could easily crack down on the protestors and the Soviet Union could send in tanks. Handing the communists reasons to react forcefully would help no one, least of all the protesters. Bush’s basic approach was correct and has been vindicated by history.

One of those neoconservatives, columnist Mark Steyn, points out that the Iranian regime will interpret whatever Obama does or does not do however they see fit, noting that they’re already railing against American “interference” and saying we have no right to lecture them about human rights given, for example, the debacle with the Branch Davidians in Waco during Bill Clinton’s presidency.

There’s a very basic lesson here: 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. Fair enough. But over in the Balkans junkyard the various mangy old pooches saw it rather differently. And so did the Muslim world, which regarded British and European “neutrality” as a form of complicity in mass murder.

And, of course, the United States, along with our NATO allies, ultimately decided we had no choice but to intervene, first in Bosnia and later in Kosovo.

Like Zakaria, NYT op-ed columnist Roger Cohen thinks the situation permanently changed, observing that Khameini has “lost his aura.”

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner ss

For now, however, Obama is keeping his powder dry.  Yesterday, he issued his strongest statement yet:

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reports that “U.S. officials say Obama is intent on calibrating his comments to the mood of the hour. They say he is seeking to avoid having the demonstrators accused of being American stooges and is trying to preserve the possibility of negotiating directly with the Iranian government over its nuclear program, links to terrorism, Afghanistan and other issues.”  He adds that, “Despite increasingly intense Republican criticism, and the passage of resolutions in the House and Senate on Friday that were tougher than the president’s words, U.S. officials say they will stick to their current course.”

Is there a point at which waiting will become intolerable?  Perhaps.

They say there is not much the United States can do to influence the situation — except make it worse for the opposition — but they have begun planning for the administration’s response if the crackdown turns very violent.

“We have to watch every day to see what is happening, even while we anticipate several different possibilities and what to do in those circumstances,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Within the administration, officials say, Obama’s cautious stance has the support of key senior officials, with disagreements centered mostly on quibbles over a word choice.

It’s a frustrating balancing act that will please no one.  It’s not at all clear, however, that there are better options at this point.

Photo: Reuters Pictures.

The United States is a very large and diverse country, its people have many differing views as you’d expect in such a country, and, not particularly surprisingly, some of those views are in diametric opposition. That’s particularly apparent in Americans’ views of how we should interact with Iran.

Isolationism remains a strong strain of thought in the United States and many if not most Americans are largely uninterested in what goes on in the next county let alone halfway across the world as long as it doesn’t affect their daily lives. These Americans would just as soon ignore the Iranian election as anything else. Another strain of isolationism sees dealing with Iran as the responsibility of international institutions: the United Nations, NATO, the IAEA, anybody as long as it doesn’t involve us. Make no mistake “let George do it” is as isolationistic as simply wishing it wouldn’t bother us.

For some Americans, pessimistic realists, the only way to deal with Iran is military force. So far those who favor attacking or invading Iran haven’t come up with an explanation of how they’ll achieve their objectives with anything short of an exterminatory strike or why such a course would be morally justifiable, what forces they’d use for an invasion of Iran, or that there’s political support for such a course of action.

In the blogosphere lately optimistic idealists have been stridently vocal in their support for the Iranian people’s aspirations for freedom. That presupposes that those in Iran who want a freer, more democratic Iran are representative of Iranians, generally, that if a fair reckoning of the vote had been made it would have resulted in a different outcome, that any likely outcome of the processes that are unfolding in Iran would result in a freer, more democratic Iran, and that how we or our government react can have any positive influence on how events develop in Iran.

President Obama has heretofore taken the position that we should negotiate with whomever is elected to the presidency in Iran and has responded warily to the demonstrators and whatever opposition movement they represent.

This morning Nader Mousavizadeh, consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, makes an interesting suggestion in an op-ed in the Washington Post, that we should engage Iran and ignore Ahmadinejad:

First, the administration should provide unequivocal recognition of Iran’s popular movement for greater freedoms and openness, and condemn the government’s crackdown. Whether an “Obama effect” has been at work in the streets of Tehran the past few days is not important; what matters is that after 30 years, the tired chant of “Death to America” has been replaced by “Death to the dictator.” A change is echoing down the capital’s boulevards that this U.S. president cannot fail to honor.

Second, the administration should interpret Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s sanction of Ahmadinejad’s “victory” as confirmation — if any was needed — that the supreme leader is the power that matters in Iran, and, as such, is the person with whom a strategic dialogue should be established. Taking Ahmadinejad’s bait for another four years would be both counter-productive and unnecessary. Already, the Obama administration has explored ways to establish a line of communication with Khamenei. Through trusted intermediaries and imaginative diplomacy, opportunities for a direct dialogue with the supreme leader will present themselves. They must be seized.

The key elements of this negotiation are well known: persuading Iran not to weaponize its nuclear program and to urge its allies in Hamas and Hezbollah to pursue their aims through political and not military means. In return, Iran could look forward to acceptance of a legitimate role for itself in regional security and, over time, reintegration into the international community. It is as clear now as it was before last week’s voting that such a strategic dialogue, however challenging, is better served by starting with areas of common interest — such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq — as opposed to the nuclear dispute. If Iran’s true nuclear capabilities remain shrouded in mystery today, its people’s intentions regarding a future of greater freedoms and peaceful engagement with the world have never been clearer.

That’s a program that makes sense to me. To his “key elements” I’d add ensuring that Iran conforms fully to its obligations under the NPT and relevant UN resolutions on North Korea.

That might be interpreted as placing President Obama in something of a predicament but I don’t think that’s true. Pursuing different policies when circumstances change, as they clearly have been revealed to have done in Iran, isn’t a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of sanity.

Like James Poulos, “I like the Iranian reformers more than I like the mass politics of solidarity by symbolism.”

As such, I’m sympathetic to John Cole in thinking that the rabid coverage of the Iranian election controversy by enthusiastic American bloggers who know next to nothing about Iran is overblown.  (I include myself in the decided non-expert on matters Persian category.) He’s right that many of us got carried away with the “Democracy, whiskey, sexy” bit during the heady days after successfully toppling Saddam Hussein before all hell broke loose in Iraq and that some of that vibe is apparent now.

Cheering from afar is harmless enough and if it makes you feel good to adorn your apparel and websites green, by all means do it.  It’s no less silly than wearing your favorite team’s jersey while you drink beer and watch them on TV.

But revolution isn’t a spectator sport.  Demonstrators are getting killed in Iran in outrage over what they believe was a stolen election.  Sadly, those deaths will likely be in vain, in that the mullahs will continue to rule and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will probably stay president.

The United States will stand by and do nothing.  We’re not going to dispatch our military to affect regime change to support the Green Twitter Revolution, or whatever the hell we’re calling it.  Nor should we.  This is the Iranian people’s fight.

Over at New Atlanticist, I’ve published my thoughts on this weekend’s Iranian election mess in two separate posts: Iran’s Elections: What We Know (And What We Don’t) and Iran’s Elections: What Now?

The short answers:  “Not a whole hell of a lot” and “The same thing we do every day, Pinky.”

I’m reasonably sure that the elections were stolen. Indeed, I’m not convinced that the regime even bothered to count the vote. But, like my colleague Dave Schuler, I considered the elections a sham from the get-go.  For that matter, I thought Iran’s elections were a sham four years ago.

I feel for those poor kids in all the photos, videos, and Tweets Andrew Sullivan has posted over the last three days.  At the end of the day, though, Joe Biden is right: “Talks with Iran are not a reward for good behavior.  Our interests are the same before the election as after … and that is we want them to cease and desist from seeking a nuclear weapon and having one in its possession and secondly to stop supporting terror.”

Our interests in the region are unchanged.  So, for that matter, are the Iranian regime’s. All that’s different now is that any Western notions that they’re dealing with a democratic regime have been dashed. To the extent that our negotiators harbored such illusions, this weekend’s rude awakening is a necessary dose of reality.

Much more at the links.

Photo: Reuters Pictures.

I’m going to write up a longish piece trying to make sense of the Iranian elections for New Atlanticist later today.  Since comparisons to happenings in America seem to be the blogospheric rage de jour, however, I will just note that I have received the news that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered the Guardian Council to “look into charges by pro-reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has said he is the rightful winner of Friday’s presidential election” almost identically to O.J. Simpson’s announcement upon acquital that he would begin a search for “the real killer.”

Photo: Getty Images

As it turns out there was an independent nationwide poll taken in Iran three weeks before the election and the results of the poll were consistent with the election results. In their op-ed in the Washington Post Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty, whose organizations produced the poll, conclude:

Allegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world. Before other countries, including the United States, jump to the conclusion that the Iranian presidential elections were fraudulent, with the grave consequences such charges could bring, they should consider all independent information. The fact may simply be that the reelection of President Ahmadinejad is what the Iranian people wanted.

Ballen and Doherty deal with the obvious criticism that respondents were only giving safe answers:

Some might argue that the professed support for Ahmadinejad we found simply reflected fearful respondents’ reluctance to provide honest answers to pollsters. Yet the integrity of our results is confirmed by the politically risky responses Iranians were willing to give to a host of questions. For instance, nearly four in five Iranians — including most Ahmadinejad supporters — said they wanted to change the political system to give them the right to elect Iran’s supreme leader, who is not currently subject to popular vote. Similarly, Iranians chose free elections and a free press as their most important priorities for their government, virtually tied with improving the national economy. These were hardly “politically correct” responses to voice publicly in a largely authoritarian society.

At this point this is my understanding of the facts as we know them. According to the official results, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won by a substantial margin. Those results are consistent with the findings of an independent nationwide poll taken three weeks before the election. Preliminary statistical analyses of the results do not satisfy a prima facie case for fraud as the determining factor in the elections. The structure of the Iranian political system is such that it is incapable of producing a legitimate outcome by our standards.

There have been rallies and demonstrations both opposed to the election results and in support of them over the weekend in Iran. The government has put down opposition demonstrations, frequently violently.

There are reports of detentions of opposition candidates, mass arrests, killings of opposition demonstrators, and the use of Arabic-speaking bullyboys by the government in putting down the demonstration. All of these are consistent with past incidents that challenged the ruling oligarchy but to the best of my knowledge they remain unconfirmed.

Some have questioned the results of the elections based on inferences about how people in specific regions might have voted. Those are certainly suggestive of some degree of vote fraud and I don’t doubt that some degree of vote fraud was involved in boosting totals for the official winner. I don’t honestly know whether that jiggering resulted in a change in the outcome or just a higher apparent total for the incumbent. Considering the known facts I suspect more the latter.

Rather than name calling or impugning the intelligence or motives of those who have arrived at evaluations different from our own, it might be more productive to discuss what might have happened in the Iranian election, relating our conclusions to the facts as we know them and clearly distinguishing among facts, suppositions, inferences, and preferences. Further, what do the facts on the ground portend for the relationship between our two countries?

In Spiegel Flynt Leverett throws cold water on the Iran election conspiracy theorists in the West:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mahmud Ahmadinedschad hat einen überwältigenden Wahlsieg errungen. Sind Sie überrascht?

Leverett: Nein. Ich wäre überrascht gewesen, wenn er verloren hätte. Die westlichen Medien haben die Begeisterung für seinen wichtigsten Herausforderer Hossein Mussawi grob überschätzt. Sie haben fast gar nicht mitbekommen, wie eindeutig Ahmadinedschad etwa als Sieger der TV-Debatte im Wahlkampf angesehen wurde. Bei amerikanischen und westlichen Politikern gab es viel Wunschdenken – und das hatte leider auch einen starken Einfluss auf die Medienberichterstattung.

English:

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has won an overwhelming electoral victory. Are you surprised?

Leverett: No. I would have been surprised if he had lost. The Western media overstated the surge of his main challenger Hossein Mousavi over the last couple of weeks. They missed almost entirely how Ahmadinejad was perceived to have been the victor in the TV debate, for instance. There was an extraordinary amount of wishful thinking among American and Western policymakers and that has had a marked impact on the media coverage.

Hat tip: Politico

For German speakers the rest of the interview is very interesting. Leverett goes on to emphasize that the Western media sold us all a bill of goods, that American politicians mistakenly assume that the Iranian political system works the way ours does, some observations about President Obama’s Cairo speech, etc.

Please note that Leverett’s comments are much in the same vein as were mine yesterday.

Update

Andrew Sullivan needs to read a little more closely. I’m not defending the Iranian regime and in virtually every post I’ve written on this subject I’ve said as clear as clear can be that I don’t think the Iranian system is capable of producing a legitimate result.

The Western media are continuing to react in stunned disbelief to the results of the Iranian election:

TEHRAN, June 13 (Reuters) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday an election in which he secured another four-year term was “free and healthy”, rejecting allegations of irregularities by a moderate rival in the vote.

“People voted for my policies,” the conservative president said in a televised address a day after the disputed election, in his first post-election comment.

“It was a free and healthy election,” he said, without making direct reference to assertions by former Prime Minister Mirhossein Mousavi that there were many violations in the vote.

As he was speaking, supporters of Mousavi clashed with police in various places in Tehran, chanting anti-Ahmadinejad slogans, witnesses said.

“Everybody should respect people’s vote … we need a calm atmosphere to build the country,” Ahmadinejad said.

Some Westerners are producing charts and graphs and claiming that the election can’t possibly have been legitimate. Not so says Nate Silver:

…there was more wave-to-wave variation in the Ahmadinejad-Moosavi results than the statistical analysis I cited above seems to imply. Ignoring votes for minor candidates, Ahmadinejad won a high of 70.4 percent of the votes in Wave 1, and a low of 62.3 percent in the votes newly added in Wave 6. By comparison, Obama’s share of the newly-added votes in our experiment ranged from 56.4 percent in Wave 3 to 44.7 percent in Wave 4. That’s slightly more variance than we saw in the Iranian results but not much.

To be clear, these results certainly do not prove that Iran’s election was clean. I have no particular reason to believe the results reported by the Interior Ministry. But I also don’t have any particular reason to disbelieve them, at least based on the statistical evidence. If Moosavi truly did have the support of a majority of Iran’s citizenry, the best evidence we will have of that is what happens in the streets of Tehran over the next days and weeks.

That was my reaction yesterday to the graph and why I didn’t comment on it. As the vote count rises, so do the totals of the candidates. So what? It proves nothing unless you’re taking that the vote was rigged as an assumption.

Gordon Robison has an excellent backgrounder on the Iranian electoral system and an analysis of the election which you might want to read in full. He proposes three alternative explanations for the outcome of the election:

• The election was stolen.
• There has been a coup.
• Ahmadinejad got the most votes and won.

As I suggested yesterday the greatest casualty of this election isn’t Iranian democracy but the narrative being promulgated by the Western media that some sort of liberalizing reform was possible in Iran via the democratic process. The affirmation procedure that Iran’s elections embody isn’t worthy of the name “democracy”. The narrative could only have been produced by a combination of wishful thinking, argument from consequences, and Western journalists restricting their interviews to anybody they found in the bar of the Hilton (or the present day Iranian equivalent). And as many are saying today, Tehran is not Iran.

The protests and violent clashes in Iran that are being reported between those who are outraged over the election and the authorities will be put down. The Iranian authorities will use whatever level of force is necessary to do that. God is on their side.

Frankly, I doubt that we’ll see genuine reform in Iran until the revolutionary generation has faded from the scene, thirty or so years hence. Their successors won’t have the old revolutionary fervor.

I do think that this outcome places the Obama Administration in something of a pickle. There is little doubt in my mind that reelected President Ahmadinejad will intensity his rhetoric and be prepared to demand more concessions to come to the bargaining table. It takes two to negotiate. Do the Iranians think they need to?

My advice: don’t. Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been pronounced the winner in Iran’s presidential election:

TEHRAN —President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won Iran’s presidential election in a landslide, officials of Iran’s election commission said Saturday morning. But his main rival, Mir Hussein Moussavi, had already announced defiantly just two hours after the polls closed on Friday night that he had won and charged that there had been voting “irregularities.”

The Times reporter devotes most of the rest of the article to challenging the legitimacy of the election without a great deal of concrete evidence other than the claims of the loser and that the Times has been pitching the possibility of an upset. When the election has been portrayed, bafflingly, as a referendum on Iran’s foreign policy what other choice did the reporter have? Remember: all politics is local.

The election was illegitimate from the get-go. The “irregularities” didn’t begin yesterday. The Iranian system is one in which the elected officials have little or no real power, only candidates that have been approved by Iran’s actual rulers appear on ballots, and the mullahs, Iran’s real rulers, control the election process and the media from stem to stern.

All we can say now is than in Iran the people have spoken. The people that matter, anyway.

Update

The Washington Post quotes a few Ahmadinejad voters which may cast more light on the results:

In Shahr-e Rey, south of Tehran, voter Ali Badiri said that young women without head scarves had been dancing in the streets over Mousavi’s candidacy. “I’ll vote for Ahmadinejad, because if Mousavi wins, they will be dancing naked next week,” he said.

“We don’t want to change Iran,” said Abdollah Khalili, another Ahmadinejad voter. “We want this system to remain the way it is.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has responded to President Obama’s message to the Islamic world, delivered in an interview with al Arabiyah this week:

The US should apologise for “crimes” it has committed against Iran if it wants a better relationship with Tehran, the Iranian president said today, after recent overtures to the Muslim world from the new administration in Washington.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s uncompromising tone followed a conciliatory message from Barack Obama, the US president, earlier this week when he told the Islamic world: “We are not your enemies.” In his inauguration last week, Obama offered to extend a hand of peace if Iran “unclenched its fist”.

At a rally in western Iran today, broadcast live on national television, Ahmadinejad said Iran would welcome a change in US policy provided it involved a withdrawal of American troops from abroad and an apology to Iran.

“Those who say they want to make change, this is the change they should make: they should apologise to the Iranian nation and try to make up for their dark background and the crimes they have committed against the Iranian nation,” he said.

The Iranian leader listed a range of “crimes”, such as trying to block what Tehran says is a peaceful nuclear power programme, hindering Iran’s development since the 1979 revolution and other actions by US administrations dating back more than 60 years.

It seems to me there’s more than one way to think about this. How do nations interact on the basic of mutual respect? Is it by apologizing for past injuries or by recognizing that nations don’t apologize to each other? Is a call for conciliation itself a way to smooth the waters or like throwing chum into the water, to be interpeted as weakness and the time to exact concessions or humiliate the party offering conciliation?

It may be a way to separate those in the Islamic world who are open to a relationship of mutual respect from those who aren’t. Or it may be a teachable moment for the Obama Administration.

The United States has not had a formal diplomatic presence in Iran since our embassy there was stormed and its staff taken hostage on November 4, 1979.  That may soon change, Ewen MacAskin reports for The Guardian.

The Guardian has learned that an announcement will be made in the next month to establish a US interests section – a halfway house to setting up a full embassy. The move will see US diplomats stationed in the country.

The news of the shift by Bush who has pursued a hawkish approach to Iran throughout his tenure comes at a critical time in US-Iranian relations. After weeks that have seen tensions rise with Israel conducting war games and Tehran carrying out long-range missile tests, a thaw appears to be under way.

[...]

A frequent complaint of the Iranians is that they want to deal directly with the Americans instead of its surrogates, Britain, France and Germany.

Bush has taken a hard line with Iran throughout the last seven years but, in the dying days of his administration, it is believed he is keen to have a positive legacy that he can point to.

The return of US diplomats to Iran is dependent on agreement by Tehran. But President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad indicated earlier this week that he was not against the opening of a US mission. Iran would consider favourably any request aimed at boosting relations between the two countries, he said.

[...]

The special interests section would be similar to the one in Havana, Cuba. The US broke off relations with Cuba in 1961 after Castro’s takeover but US diplomats returned in 1977. The special interests section carries out all the functions of an embassy. It is, in terms of protocol, part of the Swiss embassy but otherwise is staffed by Americans and independent of the Swiss.

The fact of the matter is that we have had diplomatic relations with the Iranian government in all but name throughout this period.  Indeed, we negotiated the release of our Embassy hostages.  Less happily, the Reagan administration engaged in a convoluted and illegal sale of arms to the Iranians in exchange for cash to illegally support the Nicaraguan Contras.  And the Bush administration, despite saber rattling, has obviously been talking as well.

The amusing thing about these reports is the stance that our relations with Iran deteriorated markedly under Bush.  After all, Bill Clinton had eight years in office during a much more settled period in U.S. – Middle East relations and made no serious moves in this direction.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his gang of mullahs are said to be “seriously considering” the latest EU 5+1 proposals on resolving the international standoff on the Iranian nuclear program and are telling President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to pipe down.

Warren Strobel:

Iran’s senior diplomat said Tuesday that Tehran was seriously considering a new offer from six world powers to resolve the dispute over its nuclear program, and he praised the package as “constructive.” The unusually positive remarks by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki to a small group of reporters raised hope that a negotiated solution can be found to defuse the crisis.

[...]

During a 90-minute luncheon at Iran’s United Nations mission, Mottaki dismissed the growing speculation that Israel or the United States will strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities during President Bush’s last six months in office. He described news reports to that effect as part of a long-running campaign of “psychological warfare.” The chance that Israel will attack Iran “is almost nil,” Mottaki said. As for a U.S. strike, he said there was little public support in this country for a new conflict. “The consequences of such an attack cannot be predicted,” he said.

Mottaki is a much keener observer of American politics than most Western observers, it would seem.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, conveyed the offer to Tehran two weeks ago. It essentially repackages a two-year-old proposal by Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States to give Iran political, economic and security rewards if it “verifiably suspends its enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.”

Presumably, the passage of two years has made it plain that no better offer would be forthcoming. Mottaki’s colleague, Ali Akbar Velayati, who serves as the top foreign policy advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, offered some amusingly twisted logic as a face-saving explanation:

“Americans wanted Iran not to accept Solana,” Velayati told the hard-line daily newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Therefore our interests imply that we should embrace Solana.”

Whatever works, I guess. This, though, is what got everyone’s attention:

In a sign of apparent high-level debate in Iran, a top aide to the country’s supreme religious leader made a veiled swipe Tuesday at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who’s used belligerent rhetoric to defend Iran’s nuclear work. “Officials … should avoid illogical and provocative sloganeering,” Ali Akbar Velayati, a foreign policy adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in published remarks, Reuters reported. His remarks seemed targeted at Ahmadinejad, although he didn’t mention the president by name.

While Ahmadinejad is the public face of the Iranian government, he’s by no means its most important player, despite the obsession with him by the media and some American politicians. As has been the case since the 1979 revolution, the clerics run the show with the Supreme Leader as the first among equals.

This, via Laura Rosen, strikes me as a fair read:

“What Velayati is presenting is a softening up of Iranian opinion as to why Iran might accept some sort of suspension without him going into that,” Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, interprets Velayati’s remarks. “And then Velayati goes on to say that under the current circumstances, Iran can do this because of the fact that the international community has recognized Iran’s right to enrich. So in effect, Velayati is saying, Iran can declare victory and compromise, and that if it doesn’t do this, there will be a stronger case for war against Iran and a continuation of economic sanctions, which it’s very clear are hurting Iran’s economy.”

Of course, as Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of the Iranian atomic energy organization, reminds us “as in everything in Iran, things could change tomorrow.”

Photo credit: Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty via TIME

Update (Dave Schuler)

I believe Iranian acceptance of this offer would be a benign development for all sorts of reasons of proverbial prudence including “jar-jar is better than war-war” and “half a loaf is better than none”. The offer should have a sell-by date or I see no reason that they’ll not deliberate it forever.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly enough. The Iranian regime really needs to be more forthcoming about their past and present nuclear development activities for us to have any confidence that whatever nuclear development activity they cease is the nuclear development activity they have. Otherwise we’ll just be subsidizing their R&D.

The greatest danger I see in it is that European countries, blinded by a fog of Euro signs, will see Iranian acceptance of this baby stuff as big enough to take the pressure off Iran. 43% of Iranian imports are from the EU. That dwarfs China, the next largest vendor, by a considerable amount.

However, Iran’s import partners who are probably most able to influence the regime may well also be those necks are most on the line in the face of rising Iranian power in the region, Oman and Saudi Arabia (13th and 17th on the list, respectively). I don’t have detailed stats on the exports of these countries to Iran but I suspect their exports are mostly gasoline. Most of what Iran uses it does not refine itself.

Remember that National Intelligence Estimate saying that Iran had ended its nuclear weapons program years ago? It turns out that Iran is as little as six months away from nukes. And it’s not some neo-con warmonger saying thus but none other than International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei.

In an interview with Al-Arabiya, he said, “If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty], expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least… six months to one year…”

Noah Shactman says we shouldn’t be surprised. Not only were reliable intelligence community dissenters — including those from the decidedly non-hawkish State Department — saying this when the NIE came out but the IAEA has been sending signals that Iran has become less cooperative for quite some time.

If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Barack Obama is a wise man, indeed.

He’s changed his mind a lot lately. The latest example is NAFTA. After having campaigned in Ohio and elsewhere on the need to renegotiate our trade agreement with Canada and Mexico and excoriating Hillary Clinton for her long-time support for it (all the while Austan Goolsby was telling the Canadians that this was just “policy positioning” and not to take it seriously), the presumptive Democratic nominee issued a major course correction yesterday. He’s told Fortune magazine’s Nina Easton that he may have been a bit hasty.

“Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified,” he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA “devastating” and “a big mistake,” despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? “Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don’t exempt myself,” he answered.

Obama says he believes in “opening up a dialogue” with trading partners Canada and Mexico “and figuring to how we can make this work for all people.”

Not surprisingly, those on the Right are hammering Obama for his inconsistency while some on the Left feel betrayed. HuffPo’s David Sirota sniffs, “You Can’t Represent the Uprising While Undermining It.”

Obama is trying to find a “third way” on a binary issue. He’s trying to make everyone happy – and he seems to think you can simultaneously appease Corporate America and American workers on trade rules that inherently force politicians to take one side or the other. You either have trade rules that are aimed at helping ordinary workers, or trade rules that are aimed at padding corporate profits and enriching a transnational elite. The idea that you can have both – or worse, that the NAFTA model does both – is absurd.

But this is Obama’s M.O. – he wants to please everyone. The problem for him is that the public – based on polls – knows that these policies are binary and are screwing them. If he talks out of both sides of his mouth on this issue, he will fail to represent the uprising and take advantage of this populist moment – and he will likely lose the election. That would be a huge tragedy.

NAFTA isn’t the only major policy platform on which his position has conveniently evolved in a more centrist direction in recent weeks.

Obama has started recalibrating some of his stances for the general election, and this new [foreign policy adviser] team could steer him further away from some of the bolder positions he took in the primaries.

[Madeline] Albright publicly praised Clinton’s comments that she would not meet leaders of rogue nations without pre-conditions, after Obama said he would hold such meetings and criticized Clinton’s stance. While not taking on Obama directly, [Lee] Hamilton in a recent interview said “you cannot lock yourself into something in a fluid situation” when asked about setting a precise timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Obama has indicated some flexibility on both issues in recent weeks, saying he would meet with leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad only to advance U.S. interests, and he would consider revising his plan to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq in this first two years in office if the situation there suggested a different approach.

In the cases of Ahmadinijad and Iraq, I believe Obama has genuinely evolved. He began this campaign as a neophyte on the national stage and foreign policy has only recently been an object of serious focus for him. It’s quite reasonable to think that he gave an honest, gut answer to the debate question and has since been persuaded by wiser heads that reality is more complicated than theory. In the case of NAFTA, I’m inclined to agree with Doug Mataconis that Obama is guilty of sheer pandering given the contemporaneous comments by Goolsby.

Ed Morrissey quips, “Keeping track of Obama’s positions feels like being a spectator at a table tennis match.”

Jim Hoft asks, “Is anyone really surprised by this?”

They shouldn’t be. Obama’s right: “Politicians are always guilty” of pandering to their audiences. It’s especially true of presidential candidates, who invariably tack to the center after months of appealing to an ideologically rabid base to win the nomination. Bruce McQuain observed, “The more I see and hear of Mr. Obama, the more I realize there’s nothing at all ‘new’, in a political sense, about him.”

Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing?

While politicians should absolutely be called on politically convenient policy maneuvering to both punish them for demagoguery and to ferret out what they really think, it’s far better that they ultimately adopt reasonable positions rather than stubbornly holding to ill-advised pledges. Obama has rightly been criticized for the latter in getting trapped into supporting an “accidental foreign policy” rather than admitting he was too glib in answering a debate question.

There’s a better than even chance this man will be our next president. It is, as Dave Schuler observed on yesterday’s episode of OTB Radio, quite reassuring that he’s amenable to reason.

UPDATE: John Ibbitson makes a related point very nicely for the Globe and Mail.

[I]n any election, voters should be asking themselves: Would this candidate learn from failure, or would he reinforce it? Mr. McCain’s decision to fire his campaign staff and retreat to New Hampshire when all seemed lost suggests that he can adapt his tactics and keep up his spirits in the midst of political adversity.

Mr. Obama tried to place his attachment to Rev. Jeremiah Wright within the context of race and religion in America. But when Mr. Wright renewed his outrages, the candidate repudiated the pastor entirely.

Both examples are encouraging. What each man has on his CV is really not that big a deal. The big deal involves judgment, objectivity and a sort of political humility, which in a politician can be the most important, and most elusive, asset of all.

Quite.

Dana Milbank makes a funny at Barack Obama’s expense:

Now, here’s a change we can believe in.

A mere 12 hours after claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama appeared before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee yesterday — and changed himself into an Israel hard-liner.

Classic.

As a pandering performance, it was the full Monty by a candidate who, during the primary, had positioned himself to Hillary Clinton’s left on matters such as Iran. Yesterday, Obama, who has generally declined to wear an American-flag lapel pin, wore a joint U.S.-Israeli pin, and even tried a Hebrew phrase on the crowd.

Obama even outdid President Bush in his pro-Israel sentiments. On the very day that Obama vowed to protect Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — drawing a furious denunciation from the Palestinian Authority — Bush announced that he was suspending a move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.

Pat Lang is bemused by Obama’s positioning here, noting that he won the nomination by taking a moderate tone on foreign policy while his chief opponent alienated the anti-war wing of the party with her votes supporting the Iraq War and labeling Iran’s elite military force as a “terrorist” organization. Now, he’s gone from a getting ridiculed for saying he’d sit down and talk with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to saber-rattling worthy of a neocon.

Obama said to the AIPAC devoted that he would do “anything in his power to prevent Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, anything.” Anything is a lot for an American president. Under the authorities still in force an American president has complete operational control of the strategic nuclear force. A launch order from him will be obeyed. Why? Easy. It would be a lawful order. An American president would not do that? How sure are you?

Actually, I’m pretty sure. But I must admit to sharing Lang’s confusion about what Obama is trying to do here. Yes, Obama has something of a “Jewish problem” and, yes, Democrats tend to tack right after the primaries while Republicans tack left. But this seems out of character for him and not in a good way.