Ezra Klein believes that the case for the “rationality” of the Iranian regime has been “fundamentally weakened” by the events of the last few days. Let us grant for the purposes of this discussion that the Iranian election was not only marred by fraud, but that the fraud was essential to an Ahmadinejad victory. As I would have thought Klein could see, the more vital to retaining power stealing the election becomes to thwarting Mousavi and Rafsanjani’s bid for power, the more rational (i.e., predictably self-interested) stealing the election becomes for Ahmadinejad and his allies. In other words, a large-scale fraud that swung the election back to the incumbent is the easiest to reconcile with a rational regime, which predictably wants to preserve the status quo and consolidate its power. It would be far harder to explain large-scale fraud that the incumbent did not need in order to win, except that that this, too, could be understood in terms of consolidating power.

This is not a high form of rationality, I suppose, but when people argue that the Iranian government is rational rather than self-destructive and crazy they do not mean that its members have achieved philosophical apatheia. It means that they have limited, achievable objectives, they have defined interests and will act in a self-interested fashion to pursue those interests. Most despots and authoritarians are rational actors in this way: we know what they want, how they mean to achieve it and how they can be dissuaded or cajoled. When someone says that the Iranian government is irrational and cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, for example, he is saying that they are religious maniacs who will stop at nothing to destroy their enemies, and he is saying that they are so driven by eschatological obsessions that they will happily annihilate themselves and their entire country for the cause. If we assume, as Klein does, that the stolen election is blatant, obvious and undeniable, we should all be even more relieved, because it means that the people running large parts of the Iranian government are probably just shabby politicians through and through who will go to great lengths to preserve their power and privileges. Not exactly the stuff of zealous self-annihilation, is it? Corrupt politicians who steal elections are not the sort to believe in moral victories and going down in a blaze of glory–they are the type that wants to survive. It seems implausible that these are the same people who want to usher in the apocalypse.

Klein’s second point regarding the impact of these events on U.S. policy towards Israel-Palestine may be correct, but for the life of me I can’t quite understand what one should have to do with the other. Klein wrote:

The second is that it is likely to disrupt what was, to my mind, a very positive trend in the United States: the long-overdue effort to pressure Israel on the settlements. Among America’s points of leverage was that Israel desperately needed our help to handle Iran. Among the trends freeing our hand was the apparent quieting of Iran’s drumbeat of provocations.

This is where Klein really loses me. Iranian treatment of the opposition protesters is certainly provocative and ugly from what we have seen, but do we have any reason to think that the “drumbeat of provocations” outside Iran will grow louder? Some people simply assume that repression at home and adventurism abroad are necessarily linked and that one presages the other, but there are plenty of authoritarian regimes that do not follow this pattern. Consolidating power at home consumes attention and resources, which will tend to distract from meddling elsewhere. Furthermore, if Israel “desperately” needs U.S. help to handle Iran, how has the election outcome and the protests afterward changed any of this? Has Israel’s need lessened? On top of all that, why do we keep linking Iran with the issue of settlements? There is no necessary or obvious connection, except that the Israeli government keeps bringing up Iran as a distraction from the question of Palestine. Had Mousavi prevailed, Iran’s nuclear program would not have halted, nor would its foreign policy have changed substantively, which means that as far as the rest of the world is concerned Iran’s election controversy is not and never was all that significant, so why should it derail Washington’s attempts to bring pressure on the settlement issue?