Mahmoud Abbas is threatening to resign and disband the Palestinian Authority altogether.

The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s negotiating partner, was raised as a possibility on Monday, as several aides to its president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that he intended to resign and forecast that others would follow.

“I think he is realizing that he came all this way with the peace process in order to create a Palestinian state, but he sees no state coming,” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, said in an interview. “So he really doesn’t think there is a need to be president or to have an Authority. This is not about who is going to replace him. This is about our leaving our posts. You think anybody will stay after he leaves?”

Mr. Abbas warned last week that he would not participate in Palestinian elections he called for, to take place in January. But he has threatened several times before to resign, and many viewed this latest step as a ploy by a Hamlet-like leader upset over Israeli and American policy. Many also noted that the vote might not actually be held, given the Palestinian political fracture and the unwillingness of Hamas, which controls Gaza, to participate.

In the days since, however, his colleagues have come to believe that he is not bluffing. If that is the case, they say, the Palestinian Authority, which administers Palestinian affairs in the occupied West Bank and serves as a principal actor in peace negotiations with Israel, could be endangered.

Four top officials made the same point in separate interviews. Mr. Abbas, they say, feels at a total impasse in negotiations with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declined to commit to a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu favors negotiations without preconditions.

Just like Obama!

Seriously, though, Abbas has a point.  The Palestinian Authority is in some ways the worst of both worlds, having most of the responsibilities of an independent state with none of the independence.  They’re largely powerless in the negotiating process yet treated as if they had control of their borders.  As such, “Palestinian Authority” is about as much of a misnomer as Pakistan’s “Federally Administered Tribal Areas.”

It’s not clear, however, what would replace the PA.  Fatah, Yasir Arafat’s old political wing, is much diminished these days.   And the two sides’ goals are so incompatible that it’s difficult to see how statehood ever becomes a reality.

Matthew Yglesias suggests that one thing that could aid the fight in Afghanistan would be to lower tariffs against Afghan goods and motivate our allies to do the same.

If I’m reading these slides right then textile products made in Afghanistan are not eligible for duty-free sale in the United States. Changing that rule might encourage some factory-building in Afghanistan. Similarly we see here that some of Afghanistan’s key trade partners have very high tariffs on Afghan agricultural products. Perhaps we could persuade Turkey and India that they don’t need to be charging 50+% taxes on imports of Afghan grapes. India is Afghanistan’s largest export market right now despite those high taxes; changing it would open some additional economic opportunities for people.

One of his commenters adds that the United States could probably benefit from lowering tariffs on textiles from Pakistan, as well (which are ridiculously high). I agree with this sentiment and I think that there is a lot of benefit from dropping our short-sighted agricultural tariffs and agricultural subsidies. The benefits would just be economic–they’d improve relations and security, too.

On the Rachel Maddow show last night, NBC Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel reporterd that the government in Iran has actually banned the chanting of the phrase “Allahu Akbar!”

The cries that they have been calling out at night, a lot of people have heard them. They have been calling out “Allahu Akbar.” Sometimes, they were calling out, “I am Neda,” as well in reference to that young woman who’s been shot.

Today, Iran banned those as well and asked people if they heard their neighbors calling out “Allahu Akbar” at night, which has become this rallying cry to inform on them.

As Roderick Long points out “I guess it’s clear that to Iran’s theocrats, the crat is more important than the theo.”

I agree. And when you couple this with the bans on memorial services and reports that some of the Iranian Mullahs have begun marching against the regime, I would say that Iran’s ruling regime is probably close to losing its religious legitimacy with the majority of people, if it hasn’t lost it already.

In my opinion, Barack Obama has already said too much about the Iranian situation, though at least he had the wisdom to emphasize that the United States “is not interfering in Iran’s affairs.” That’s to the good.

What I do not get, though, is exactly what some of his critics on the right are clamoring for apart from a strongly worded condemnation that would make us feel good. Take Michael Ledeen, for example, who complains this morning that:

One thing seems certain: the Iranian people were right when they realized that nobody in the outside world would help them. They’re on their own.

Which is indeed a great pity, and a terrible stain on our national virtue.

Of course, Ledeen never bothers to explain what, exactly, he wants done. Just “something.” Well, what? As I’ve noted before, our options are already limited. We have no official diplomatic ties with Iran. We barely trade with them, and encouraging the rest of the world to sanction Iran would cripple democratic reform movements. A military strike would not only be an act of lunacy, but it would virtually guarantee that the Mullah’s regime remains in place. (That’s assuming, of course, that we could spare troops for a military incursion–which we can’t.)

It’s frustrating, as Americans, to watch a group of people fight for freedom thousands of miles away. It’s only natural to want to help in some way or fashion. But the real truth of the matter is this: this isn’t our fight. The Iranian protesters don’t care about our eloquent defenses of them. They care about their own rights; their own freedom; their own families. And that’s as it should be.

There are really only a few, tiny actions that Americans can do that could make a difference. And that difference would only be very slight. It’s times like these that people would do well to remember the virtues of humility and restraint.

This is the Iranian people’s fight. We can cheer them on, but unfortunately, there’s not much else to do that doesn’t bear a risk of making things worse for them.

In a White House press conference still underway, President Obama condemned the actions of Iran’s government in his strongest language to date:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday declared the United States and the entire world “appalled and outraged” by Iran’s violent efforts to crush dissent, a clear toughening of his rhetoric as Republican critics at home pound him for being too passive.

Obama condemned the “threats, beatings and imprisonments of the last few days.” “I strongly condemn these unjust actions,” Obama said in a news conference at the White House.

[...]

“I have made it clear that the United States respects the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is not interfering in Iran’s affairs,” Obama said. “But we must also bear witness to the courage and dignity of the Iranian people, and to a remarkable opening within Iranian society. And we deplore violence against innocent civilians anywhere that it takes place.”

Obama noted the killing of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, whose apparent shooting death was captured on video and circulated worldwide. “We have seen courageous women stand up to brutality and threats, and we have experienced the searing image of a woman bleeding to death on the streets,” Obama said. “While this loss is raw and painful, we also know this: Those who stand up for justice are always on the right side of history.”

I’m not sure what more he can say, short of threatening military action.  From what I’ve gathered from my Twitter stream, however, a lot of people are still not satisfied.

I’ve been reading on several different sites the news that the Iranian regime is actively forbidding memorial services and any signs of mourning for those people who are the victims–to the point where they have actually had victims buried in secret in the hopes that their families won’t find out.

I think that this, more than anything else, might actually lead to the downfall of the regime. The Mullahs apparently haven’t read Antigone, or they would know that devotion to religion and family will, in the end, triumph over the will of the state.

Thomas Barnett predicts that, “Iran will experience an overthrow of the mullahs’ rule by 2010.”

A slightly bold prediction, you say, but not exactly a hard one to make given ongoing events?   Does he get extra points for having written the above in the summer of 2003 and publishing it on page 380 of Pentagon’s New Map?

Considering I’d be leery of making that prediction even considering ongoing events, I’d say so.

Daniel Larison makes an excellent point against those people who are now calling for increased sanctions against Iran:

This is madness. Have the current sanctions brought the regime anywhere close to its knees after decades? There is not a single example where economic sanctions actually compelled a non-democratic regime to change course on an internal political matter. We have no reason to believe that it will work. What we do know is that it will make average Iranians poorer. The nascent Iranian middle class that everyone is so pleased with will be impoverished, and their economic prospects will go from bad to worse. Causing a run on the rial would annihilate whatever savings average Iranians have and magnify their current inflation problem, which could have a political radicalizing effect and not one that we would find attractive. Tanking the Iranian economy would mean that unemployment shoots up even higher than the already miserable 20%+ that it is now.

[...]

Why would such an imposition of sanctions not allow the authorities to claim the mantle of nationalist resistance against international hostility? Milosevic held on for years longer than he would have been able to do otherwise because of the hostility towards Serbia that most of the world showed in the ’90s. Why would imposing extremely tight sanctions not put the protesters on the defensive and blunt their earlier criticism about Iranian economic grievances? As bad as the government’s mismanagement and corruption undoubtedly are, economic conditions can always get worse under tightened international sanctions, and the regime will be able to argue truthfully that conditions have worsened because of policies advanced by Washington.

Amen to that. I have never understood the perpetual popularity of economic sanctions as a means of “punishing” authoritarian regimes. It rarely has the desired effect.

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.

On his own blog and at Hot Air, Patrick “Patterico” Frey has the surreal juxtaposition of purported Iranians Twittering the horrors of protesting an evil regime intermixed with CBS White House correspondent Mark Knoller’s account of President Obama taking his girls out for ice cream.

As Josh Trevino tweets, “Obama going for ice cream has all the symbolism of [Cowboys quarterback Tony] Romo going to Mexico” during the 2007 playoffs.

He’s right, of course.  But Laura Methvin (via Terasa Kopec) gets it right: “I’m not bothered that POTUS went for ice cream while Iran’s in turmoil; I’m bothered that everyone at MSNBC did.”

It’s Fathers’ Day weekend and Obama is urging men to be better fathers.  Making time to be with your kids is the essence of fatherhood.  As he puts it:

As fathers, we need to be involved in our children’s lives not just when it’s convenient or easy, and not just when they’re doing well—but when it’s difficult and thankless, and they’re struggling. That is when they need us most.

And it’s not enough to just be physically present. Too often, especially during tough economic times like these, we are emotionally absent: distracted, consumed by what’s happening in our own lives, worried about keeping our jobs and paying our bills, unsure if we’ll be able to give our kids the same opportunities we had.

Our children can tell. They know when we’re not fully there. And that disengagement sends a clear message—whether we mean it or not—about where among our priorities they fall.

So we need to step out of our own heads and tune in. We need to turn off the television and start talking with our kids, and listening to them, and understanding what’s going on in their lives.

The challenge for presidents’ time isn’t the TV and paying of bills but the sense that they’re indispensable. It’s not as if there’s not going to be something going on next weekend that doesn’t merit his attention more than vanilla custard in a waffle cone.

Obama issued a statement yesterday on Iran that was more direct than any he’s issued so far but still more tepid than many would like:

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.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what it is Obama should have been doing.  He’s got a team of thousands to “monitor the situation.”

He could, I suppose, reiterate that Iran’s regime is part of an “Axis of Evil.”  Or, borrowing from Ronald Reagan, he could say Iran has replaced the defunct Soviet Union as the new “Evil Empire.”  That might make us feel better but the benefit to the demonstrators risking their lives in the streets is unclear; it could even be harmful to their cause.

Meanwhile, the TV networks could certainly show better news judgment than giddy celebrity coverage of the president’s trip to the ice cream parlor when there’s real news to report.

Photo: Reuters Pictures. It should be noted this is from an August 2008 campaign stop, not yesterday’s visit to Dairy Godmother in Alexandria.

Update: The sentence on Romo’s trip to Mexico has been rewritten and hyperlinked for context and clarity.

Andrew Sullivan writes that “No Recognition Of Ahmadinejad” must be considered “the first and absolute requirement of all Western governments.”

In my New Atlanticist post “Negotiating with Iran without Preconditions,” I recall this famous exchange from the July 24, 2007 CNN/YouTube debate:

More commentary and analysis at the link.

Amidst the blogospheric solidarity for the Iranian protestors, it’s worth pointing to news that has been overshadowed by those events: The UN and OSCE monitors are leaving Georgia.

Despite declarations that “we’re all Georgians now,” the fact of the matter has been from the beginning that neither the United States nor Western Europe had any appetite to go toe-to-toe with the Russians over the fate of two disputed provinces.  That remained true even once Russian troops moved into “Georgia proper.”

The man who famously made the above pledge, Senator John McCain, made some similarly bold statements about Iran in a Twitter interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper. Most notable of his tweets: “we must stand strong for democracy in Iran as we stood for Democracy in Poland, Germany, and Czechoslovakia” and “if we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail.”

As I note in a New Atlanticist post contrasting the American and European responses to Iran’s election fiasco,

The American president is, for good and bad, in a unique position.  As important and powerful as the leaders of the UK, France, and Germany are, they’re not the international lightning rods that the occupants of the White House are.

Aside from the fact that backing from America could quite likely harm Mousavi’s cause and help Ahmadinejad’s, big words from the Leader of the Free World^TM must be backed up by action in a way that a statement by the European Union do not.

[...]

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, probably the American blogosphere’s most passionate supporter of the Iranian protestors, writes, “I’m relieved we don’t have a president McCain. His heart is in the right place but his head is a blogger’s, not a president’s.”  My strong guess, though, is that, had McCain prevailed in November, he would be saying much the same thing.   Presidential candidates and senators have the luxury of spouting off about their ideals, while a president’s words have much more consequence.

A whole lot more at the links.

Via Twitter, James Poulos passes along an interesting piece by Conor Friedersdorf titled “Iran, Twitter, and The American Information Elite.”  Basically, he noticed over the weekend that all of his blogger/journalist friends were intensely aware of what was happening in Iran whereas other well educated people he encountered hadn’t the slightest clue.

I can’t help noticing that information elites are able to process breaking news and form political opinions about it faster than ever before (see the Feiler Faster thesis as told by Mickey Kaus); that these folks are blogging and Tweeting their policy suggestions and demands almost immediately; and that due to arguably dubious strategic political considerations, all of Congress seems to be getting on Twitter.

Are we approaching a point where political information is processed so fast that an event happens, information elites weigh in to shape the discourse surrounding it, the conventional wisdom is communicated to Congress, and elected leaders formulate reactions based on public opinion… all before most of even the formerly plugged in members of the public ever learn what on earth is going on, or have a chance to form an opinion? Is anyone who works at a company that blocks their Facebook feed going to be meaningfully disadvantaged in the political process? Egalitarian concerns aside, are the information elites going to set a course, ossify as they always do in their opinions, and influence the nation’s course too hastily? Are we on course for a kind of political singularity?

An interesting set of questions.  Having been blogging virtually daily for the past six and a half years, the way I process and consume information has changed considerably.  Things become “old news” very quickly, so the pressure to form a strong opinion in real time is the nature of the enterprise.

I tend to start the day with Gmail and Google Reader, even on the weekends, and so processed dozens of blog posts on the subject of the Iran mess over the weekend.  Because I do most of my foreign affairs blogging at the Atlantic Council these days and 1) the topic is a bit outside our baliwick,  2) the blog I’ve developed there is aimed at providing something akin to expert analysis, and 3) having a 5-month-old means less time for writing on weekend mornings, I just read and thought about things and got around to writing Monday.

Iran’s Elections: What We Know (And What We Don’t) and Iran’s Elections: What Now? are almost surely better posts than I’d have dashed off Saturday.  But Conor’s right:  The prevailing opinion that the Iranian elections had been stolen was already formed by then and it’s reasonable to presume that the early deciders will shape the opinions of those catching up later in the week.

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.