The American Conservative

But though Bush 41 was in many respects a smashing foreign policy success, he also made a number of egregious missteps, including the notorious “Chicken Kiev” speech, in which he essentially endorsed the survival of the multinational Soviet empire and not the nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe. ~Reihan Salam

That Kiev speech really sticks in the craw, doesn’t it? I haven’t heard so much about the elder Bush’s 1991 Kiev speech in the last fifteen years as I have heard about it in the last week and a half. It seems to be a touchstone for everyone dissatisfied with “crabbed realism,” as if the “nationalist aspirations of Eastern Europe” didn’t include the aspirations to displace and slaughter one’s neighbors, expel entire populations and pursue self-destructive policies in the name of restoring national glory. All of a sudden, nationalism in Europe, which was once the scourge that neoconservatives wanted to squash in the ’90s and which horrifies them when it takes peaceful, democratic forms in western Europe, has become something in retrospect that it was wrong to discourage at the end of the Cold War.*

Over the last eighteen years, the idea that there was something unforgiveably wrong in urging Ukrainians–whose country is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy under the rule of squabbling kleptocrats–to resist seeking independence seems increasingly absurd. Warning against the dangers of nationalism as a multinational empire was coming apart at the seams was very sensible. The example of how the Ottoman Empire had come apart in the late 19th and early 20th centuries offered a sobering reminder that political fragmentation along nationalist lines in ethnically mixed societies can carry a high cost in human suffering. Given the experience of the Balkans and the Caucasus over the last eighteen years, does anyone want to look back and say that the President of the United States should have endorsed nationalist aspirations?

* I should add that neoconservatives have never had any trouble with anti-Russian nationalism, no matter what form it takes and no matter where it crops up, which is at least part of the reason why the Kiev speech must be so irritating.

Update: Of course, it doesn’t hurt to revisit what Bush actually said in 1991. For starters, there is this part:

I come here to tell you: We support the struggle in this great country for democracy and economic reform. And I would like to talk to you today about how the United States views this complex and exciting period in your history, how we intend to relate to the Soviet central Government and the Republican governments.

In Moscow, I outlined our approach: We will support those in the center and the Republics who pursue freedom, democracy, and economic liberty. We will determine our support not on the basis of personalities but on the basis of principles. We cannot tell you how to reform your society. We will not try to pick winners and losers in political competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America [bold mine-DL].

Do not doubt our real commitment, however, to reform. But do not think we can presume to solve your problems for you. Theodore Roosevelt, one of our great Presidents, once wrote: To be patronized is as offensive as to be insulted. No one of us cares permanently to have someone else conscientiously striving to do him good; what we want is to work with that someone else for the good of both of us. That’s what our former President said. We will work for the good of both of us, which means that we will not meddle in your internal affairs.

O, the villainy! Who would want to have these words on his conscience? I mean, treating other nations as if they weren’t children to be scolded and ordered about–what was the man thinking?

Looking back over the last eighteen years, during which time Washington has been obsessed with personalities, not principles, and preoccupied with picking winners and losers and telling people how to reform their societies, one wishes that there had been more of the wisdom the former President showed in Kiev and a lot less of the carping from his detractors.

Second Update: Reihan responds with a long, interesting post. It is well worth reading.

Rather than reassure the Iranians with a wink and a nod that we’re ready to do business, President Obama should be building an international coalition to isolate a recalcitrant Iran as thoroughly as the the West once isolated apartheid-era South Africa. Bush, to the chagrin of the neocons, could never pull this off [bold mine-DL]. But Obama can. ~Reihan Salam

I don’t mean to beat this one column into the ground, but there are a lot of problems with it. It would help Reihan’s argument a lot if neoconservatives had actually been chagrined by Bush’s inability to mobilize international support for his policies, but when they weren’t elaborating on the grand possibilities of the “unipolar moment” they were for the most part busily mocking the impulse to work through multilateral institutions. At the same time, they wanted credit for enforcing U.N. resolutions. They were a little too preoccupied celebrating the glories of “New Europe” and the “coalition of the willing” and pretending that cajoling the governments of small, weak countries into aligning with us on Iraq represented diplomatic triumphs on par with those of Bush’s father. When Turkey refused to permit our forces to launch part of the invasion from their territory, I don’t recall any neoconservatives complaining that Bush was bungling the diplomacy. Instead, they railed against Turkish anti-Americanism, which they found as inexplicable as it was offensive to them.

Neocons were not chagrined by Bush’s failure to mobilize international support behind the Iraq war. They were instead furious at the Russians, French and Germans for daring to oppose the war, and ultimately didn’t care whether there was international support because they believed that the war served the “greater international good,” at least as they saw it through the lens of shoring up and advancing U.S. hegemony. Neoconservatives will go through international institutions if necessary, but take for granted that it is our government that is ultimately responsible for what they understand to be global governance or, put another way, imperial management. They were not chagrined by Bush’s failure to bring greater international pressure on Iran, but rather they were embarrassed by his willingness in his second term to contemplate diplomatic approaches with Tehran, which they have always believed to be futile. To the extent that Bush was engaged in coordinating international support in his second term on Israel-Palestine, that didn’t just embarrass them, but positively outraged them.

When Obama wanted to exercise restraint and say little, many neocons demanded that he say more and say it more forcefully. Once he does that, they will demand sanctions. Once he proposes sanctions, they will demand covert action to topple the regime. Should he actually authorize covert action, they will call for bombings. This is how it works: if Obama adopts anything resembling a hawkish approach, they will praise the hawkishness but always demand escalation. Short of war with Iran, which is where the isolationist policy Reihan is proposing ultimately leads, I doubt there is anything Obama could do that would be deemed sufficient by most neoconservatives.

In the same column I responded to below, Reihan gets something else pretty badly wrong:

If the regime can’t do business with the likes of Mousavi, they certainly can’t do business with Obama, no matter how many barbecues he invites them to.

Reihan must know that this doesn’t make sense. If an authoritarian regime won’t “do business” with an internal critic and would-be opposition leader, does it follow that it won’t and can’t “do business” with a foreign government? It’s one of those things that sounds good at first (“they are implacable fanatics!”), but it is something that we know simply isn’t true. Repressive regimes have been happy to “do business” with the U.S. and other major powers for decades while simultaneously suppressing internal opponents, and as we know perfectly well Washington has been prepared to not only “do business” but also to forge decades-long alliances with authoritarian states that refuse to tolerate a viable political opposition. No one could take this kind of question seriously if it had been applied to Mubarak and Nour today, or Musharraf and Sharif a couple years ago, or even Putin and Khodorkovsky. One may or may not approve of the business being done, but the idea that the authoritarian government is the one that cannot by its very nature do business with Washington is just completely wrong.

The problem the regime has with the “likes of Mousavi” is ironically that Mousavi and those like him are too close to the leaders of the regime in his professed beliefs. He represents competition for the definition of the regime’s worldview. Heretics are always perceived as more dangerous than non-believers. He can threaten them in a way our government never could because he can replace them or show them to be frauds and shabby dealers. His time in political exile and his personal connection to Khomeini lend him credibility as a “real” revolutionary that threatens to expose them as much less than what they claimed. For these purposes, it doesn’t matter that he is allied to the shabbiest dealer of them all in Rafsanjani. At this point, they can’t risk permitting Mousavi to offer a counter-example of what the Islamic revolution ought to be. At the same time, if they can reach some sort of agreement with Washington that advances their interests, they will do so. We have seen clearly that the current leaders of the regime have no trouble engaging in the necessary ideological acrobatics to justify what they do.

The great danger of Obama’s response to the street protests in Iran has been that he’d choose Iran’s thuggish ruling class over Iran’s masses on the grounds that Serious People don’t fret about human rights when grand strategy is at stake. ~Reihan Salam

The great danger of Obama’s response is not, as Reihan suggests, that he would express too much support for an illegitimate clique of rulers. It’s that he would, like Reihan does, transfer our sympathy for the protesters onto an imagined version of Iran, one in which the population suffers together beneath an oppressive “ruling class.” ~Matt Frost

Reihan’s remark is clever, but, as Matt makes clear, it is not really accurate. While I appreciate the Greenwaldian flourish of capitalizing the word serious, Reihan must know that a large number of supposedly Serious People seem to do nothing but fret about human rights and pretend that this fretting is a grand strategy. Reihan knows or knows of many of these people, so it should be easy to remember. There is a set of old diplomats from the last century who are still rolled out on television shows during every major event overseas, and it’s fair to say that these people do not “fret” much on this score, because they understand, however poorly in some cases, that foreign policy involves the pursuit of national interests, full stop. Most would-be Serious People do their best to make clear why, even if they consider themselves to be realists, they are not as callous and unfeeling as these people are supposed to be. If they want to be Really Serious, they will sigh and gravely intone about “the nature of the regime” making normal diplomacy impossible and, perhaps if they are on track to become the Most Serious they will earnestly announce our “responsibility to protect” the people of another country.

Matt’s reminder that there are real political divisions and genuine pro-regime sentiment among millions of non-elite Iranians is a much-needed one, but I would qualify his concluding remarks by stressing how so much of this contest is a contest over which elites will dominate the state apparatus. If Obama chose to side more openly with the protesters, he would not be siding with “the masses” against “the ruling class,” but would be for all intents and purposes allying himself with Rafsanjani’s power play inside the Iranian ruling class. Say what you will about him and his corruption, but Rafsanjani is not stupid–Mousavi takes all the risks, while Rafsanjani stands to reap the rewards if the play succeeds. If it doesn’t, he will bide his time until another opportunity arises. Oligarchs use factions of the people against each other in their competitions for position, and some try to identify their cause with that of “the people,” and this has gone on for ages. It now takes place in an era of mass politics, and so we have massive factions arrayed behind different oligarchs, which are deceptively large enough to be treated as being representative of “the people.” The tragic thing is that there are probably millions of Iranians who genuinely desire a very different kind of government and if they are lucky will get Rafsanjani’s clique instead. If the critics entirely had their way, Obama would participate in this farce by investing the triumph of one clique of oligarchs with some greater meaning.

Unfortunately, Reihan gets other things wrong. He writes:

Now, however, at least some of the engagers are coming to understand that the violence in the streets is clear evidence that Khamenei’s gang is less pragmatic than they enthusiastically believed.

This isn’t clear evidence of any such thing. I do wish we would stop using the word pragmatic as if it automatically implied something moderate and decent. Nothing has made it more clear that these are shabby dealers interested only in self-preservation than the last ten days. These are precisely the people with whom one cuts deals. There are people who are fanatical about religious claims because they are genuinely willing to sacrifice everything on their behalf, which ironically means that they can sometimes be constrained and controlled by the dictates of their own religion, and there are people who use religion instrumentally for control. For whatever reason, Western hawks have desperately sought to make the world believe that Ahmadinejad in particular and the Iranian regime in general were the former, while conveniently ignoring things like the holy status of Jerusalem that might complicate their imagined doomsday scenarios, but the last ten days have shown that they are the latter. This is a crew of shameless political operators who have no qualms about cynically using religious rhetoric, even going so far as investing their fraud with divine approval, in order to hold on to power.

Pragmatic is exactly what they are, which is why we know we can make a deal with them. They have made clear that their self-interest and the self-preservation of the regime are what they value. Pragmatic people can nonetheless be violent and cruel to get what they want. Being pragmatic does not mean that one is friendly, humane or pleasant. It is a means to acquiring what one wants, and what this crew wants is simply power. The truly great danger at this point would be to mistake the regime’s violence as proof of zeal and unpredictability rather than see it as the regime’s means of self-preservation.

But now, if the clerical junta prevails, anyone who shakes hands with Ahmadinejad will have a hard time washing the blood off his own hands. ~Jonah Goldberg

This will come as news to some, but metaphorical blood is non-transferable. Nixon did not pick it up from Brezhnev or Mao, Reagan did not somehow acquire the blood of Afghans by engaging with Gorbachev throughout his two terms while Afghanistan was under Soviet occupation, nor Kennedy did leave Vienna screaming, “Out, damn spot!” If negotiating with thuggish regimes means that our leaders partake of the crimes of that regime, I assume Goldberg must be in high dudgeon about the bloody taint afflicting…well, pretty much every President since FDR. There was a time when people on the right were more resistant to the temptation to reduce foreign policy to a morality play or some sort of childish game in which negotiating with “bad guys” gave you cooties. For almost the last ten years, they have been far less so, and it’s pretty embarrassing.

So Obama has come out with a lengthier, “tougher” statement on Iran, some of which is redundant because he has said it before and most of which is unnecessary. John is appropriately critical of the move towards what some are calling the “Biden-Clinton line.” Unfortunately, I am being reminded more and more of Obama’s response to the war in Georgia, which was initially quite sane and responsible and devolved in a matter of days to more or less the same reckless foolishness that McCain had shown from the beginning. Obama never said that we are all Georgians, but he hewed to the same line on policy as those who did, and eventually he came around to endorsing the official version of the war in which “Russian aggression” was all that mattered.

Then as now, I get the sinking feeling that all of this new “more forceful rhetoric” is nothing more than delayed CYA (which is all the good this statement will do anyone), and it reconfirms my old claim that Obama tends to yield to that side that can do more political damage to him. Even though the hawkish voices who have been berating Obama are relatively few and do not represent most people in the political establishment or in the country, they have been able to pull Obama in their direction in just a little over a week because they are more influential, better-connected, more vocal, more on message and more aggressive. While the numbers favor Obama on how he handled things in the last week, I seem to have been simply wrong in assessing the ability of the critics to pressure Obama. There is a unified chorus damning Obama for weakness and dithering. There is not much in the way of organized resistance to this chorus, and the administration itself is divided (as administrations often are). For the most part, even most of his reliable supporters qualify and hedge their defenses of his recent actions (cue Roger Cohen’s complaints about “reading prepared lines”), and while his response to date enjoys wide support I have to wonder how deep it is.

One of the potential problems in defending Obama’s earlier restraint in terms of what would be counterproductive for the protesters is that it can create the expectation that Obama must abandon restraint in the event that the protests are not succeeding. After all, to frame things in terms of what is counterproductive for the protesters seems to accept that the protesters’ success ought to be the primary goal of U.S. policy, which means that the administration would have to change its approach if the protests are not succeeding. This overlooks that the protests have never been likely to succeed, and it misses that Washington cannot let its Iran policy and all of the other interests that hinge on that be dictated by internal Iranian affairs. Despite the reality that Obama was initially giving the protests their best chance to succeed, the more time that passes with the regime still in place the louder calls for being “more forceful” will become. If these calls are heeded, it will ironically make the protests even less likely to succeed for the same reasons why “more forceful rhetoric” or “more aggressive” support would have been a mistake over the last few days. Nonetheless, the pressure to show “more aggressive” support will continue to grow and will cease only in the unlikely event that the protesters prevail.

Obama has moved in the direction of the hawks at least partly because the more hawkish people have allies in the Vice President and the Secretary of State, who have been pressing the President for “tougher” statements almost from the beginning of the protests. It is also a reminder that, as with the war in Georgia, Biden’s influence is a malign one, and it is a reminder that Obama may take longer to get to the mistaken position on foreign policy his opponents have taken, but he will still get there because he does not fundamentally disagree with them about projecting power to defend “values.” Evidently, national security ideology will out.

It seems that the elements in the administration urging restraint are losing ground, which eerily mirrors the weird lack of confidence many advocates of engagement have in their own proposals on Iran policy. Having spent years resisting arguments that Iran’s government is irrational, will never negotiate, cannot be trusted and will not be compelled to change course by additional punitive measures, many advocates of engagement seem to be willing to throw in the towel at a time when engagement is not only more likely to be successful but also even more imperative. Robert Farley has now coined a phrase that deserves the Newspeak award of the year: “non-interventionist coercive strategy.” Coercion is a kind of intervention.

As I said before, Nixon went to China after the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution. For that matter, detente advanced under Brezhnev, who had just smashed the 1968 uprisings in central and eastern Europe; Sadat made peace with Israel after the Arabs had almost overrun the country in 1973. There was a time when we understood that these sorts of governments needed to believe that they were secure before they could take the risk of negotiating with old foes on major national security questions. What is so strange is that the psychology of strength and weakness that hawks apply to U.S. foreign policy (usually wrongly) all the time would be quite appropriate to apply to the internal politics of an authoritarian state, but they don’t do this because they are too busy citing the authoritarians’ abuses to justify confrontational policies against them. If they stopped for a moment and applied their constant fear of “showing weakness” to an analysis of the internal politics of the authoritarian regimes in question, they would see that the presence of a viable, vibrant opposition is probably the surest guarantee that the regime will make no deals with Washington. Authoritarians are most likely to make deals on security and foreign policy issues once they feel secure and in place. The ones who cannot afford to make a deal are those who are vulnerable and fear appearing weak, which invites internal challenges.

P.S. By the way, it won’t fly to say that the administration’s language has been consistent between last week and the start of this week. Expressing “concerns” about something and saying that one is “appalled and outraged” by the same thing are two very different sorts of statements as a matter of conveying displeasure diplomatically. Everyone can see perfectly well that the rhetoric has escalated, and whether or not Obama has escalated his rhetoric because of the critics who have been demanding “more forceful rhetoric” or for some other reason, he has escalated it. More to the point, his critics will take this language as vindication that their early, misguided demands for “tougher” language were right and his caution was not. Whether or not he was affected by the drumbeat on the Post op-ed pages, he has started moving in the direction that those writers wanted. One could even try to defend changing rhetoric as circumstances change, but to deny that there has been any change is silly and, I’m sorry to say, something we have seen several times from Obama over the last two years.

Do you think it’s an accident that when the neocons were in charge Hezbollah led the Lebanese elections but when we ditched the neocons, the Lebanese ditched Hezbollah? Do you think it’s an accident that when we ditched our far-right extremist government here in favor of a realist liberal that the liberals in Iran advanced their cause remarkably? Much further than anyone had a right to hope? ~E.D. Kain’s friend

Leaving aside some of the questionable descriptions in this quote (far-right? liberals in Iran?), yes, it was an accident! Perhaps the only thing more annoying than the use of green fonts and the sheer earnestness of some Westerners about the last two weeks is the maddening desire to describe events incorrectly to relate events in the Near East to our own political process. The Lebanese didn’t “ditch Hizbullah.” They maintained the status quo and kept the incumbent government in power, which means that Hizbullah remained in the opposition despite the fact that the opposition won the most votes. No one seems eager to paint their blogs yellow and ask where the Shi’ites’ votes went, and no wonder. Most people aren’t really that interested in having every voice be heard and fully represented, are they? We already know where their votes went–the Lebanese system is geared to misrepresent the population in parliament according to established rules that govern the settlement after the civil war. If winning 55% of the vote means that “the Lebanese ditched” the opposition, what would an opposition victory look like?

Suppose that a couple of districts had voted slightly differently, and the opposition had prevailed. We would undoubtedly hear from hawks how Obama’s election had “caused” a Hizbullah/FPM victory, but that wouldn’t make it true. A good way to test the silliness of a statement is to think about how reasonable it would sound if it were being made by your opponents against your preferred politician or in favor of one of their leaders. When people babbled about “the Arab spring” in 2005, they were horribly wrong. Enthusiasts for an “Obama effect” on the international scene are in danger of misrepresenting what has happened and what is happening to suit their hopes. This will come back to bite them. Suppose that Khamenei had decided to rig the election for Ahmadinejad, but to do so less blatantly. Would anyone believe hawkish arguments that the Cairo speech led to Ahmadinejad’s apparent victory? I would hope not, because such claims would be unfounded.

There can’t be that many countries where people earnestly believe that their elections influence the behavior of electorates in other countries. As far as I know, no one has attempted to tie local British and European election results to our presidential election or anything that Obama has done, but it would make no more sense. The Indian elections passed by almost unnoticed over here, as the incumbent government retained and even expanded its majority, and the ruling AK party lost ground in Turkey in municipal elections, and both of these were driven entirely by domestic political concerns. The “Obama effect” is rather narrowly focused, isn’t it?

The United States and the West must unite as never before. Although in the past blunt economic sanctions have hurt the average Iranian, it is now imperative that America and its allies adopt ever more stringent, focused sanctions to bring this regime to its knees as quickly as possible. The world should use available financial sanctions to precipitate a run on the Iranian rial and cause the collapse of the Iranian economy. It is better that the Iranian people suffer for a short period of time and regain their freedom and prosperity than for them to suffer under this regime with the complicity of the Western world for years to come. ~Hossein Askari

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.

That’s assuming that the things Askari proposes could actually be done. What sanctions do we seriously think we can impose at this point that would have a desirable effect? Suppose that we somehow got every major power and all of Iran’s trading partners on board. In that unlikely event, how would starving the Iranian people of goods and contacts with the outside world make them more capable of throwing off the regime’s yoke? How long is the “short period of time” during which the worsened suffering of the Iranian people is tolerable? Sanctions hurt the weakest and most vulnerable first, and they affect the powerful and wealthiest last. Leaving aside the question of whether it “works” in five or ten years’ time, how is such a policy remotely just? For twelve years I heard the immoral argument that Hussein was somehow “making” us impose the sanctions on Iraq, and that all of the human suffering we were inflicting was really not our responsibility. For how many years would we be willing to go through the motions of the same ineffective and immoral policy with Iran? Why are so many advocates of engagement and rapprochement so lacking in confidence in their own ideas about what a sound Iran policy would look like?

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.

Of course, we all know that there are states that have no interest in sacrificing their business with Iran for the sake of causing internal political change. Russia and China, and perhaps the two other members of the so-called BRIC, have no desire to lend support to an effort to police the internal affairs of another state. Even though they are too large and important to the global economy to risk the same treatment, these powers have no reason to want to provide a precedent that could be applied to their clients elsewhere in the world. If they could be imposed, how would tightened sanctions affect the regional economy and the oil market? People propose these outlandish policies and don’t even bother to address their possible consequences. We are still in global recession. How much worse are the chances for recovery if Iranian oil exports are targeted with sanctions and the price of oil shoots up past $100 again?

This is hardly the most important aspect of the debate over the Iranian protests and the administration’s response, but it seems telling that according to Rasmussen’s new poll (via Scoblete) there is not one demographic in which a majority believes that Obama has been insufficiently aggressive in his support for the protesters. This seems all the more striking given that an overall majority (54%) of likely voters believes that it makes a difference for U.S. national security who is the next Iranian President. The 54% who believe this are wrong, but what is interesting is that they think it matters for the United States whether or not Mousavi prevails and they are still not inclined to embrace the criticism that the administration has been “timid and passive,” as Lindsay Graham put it yesterday. Just 35% believe Obama has not been aggressive enough in his support; 43% believe the level of support has been “about right” and 9% (including 15% of Republicans) think he has been “too aggressive. This is good news. It means that there is no political gain with the public by being more “forceful,” which should make the administration less susceptible to pressure to take a “tougher” line that most of its members seem to understand would be a mistake.

The other noteworthy thing about these results is that 38% of Republicans think Obama’s support for the protesters has been the right amount or even too much (23/15), and 46% of independents think the same (41/5). Even among self-described conservatives, just 49% think he has not been aggressive enough, and as we have seen only one-third of all voters agrees with the Krauthammer/Wolfowitz/McCain/Graham line.

The poll also has a new crosstab feature, the “Political Class Index,” which is supposed to distinguish between popular and elite opinion. Rasmussen has defined the distinction this way:

The Political Class and Mainstream classifications are determined by the answers to three questions measuring general attitudes about government. Most Americans trust the judgment of the public more than political leaders, view the federal government as a special interest group, and believe that big business and big government work together against the interests of investors and consumers. Only seven percent (7%) share the opposite view and can be considered part of the Political Class. Another seven percent (7%) lean towards the Political Class.

As I read the crosstabs, elite pressure on the administration to take a “tougher” line will likely be minimal and will be limited to the usual suspects. 78% of the “political class” respondents (including leaners) approve of Obama’s response, compared to just 38% of the “mainstream” respondents. However, even among “mainstream” respondents only 41% agree with the view that Obama’s support has been insufficient. So there is a real constituency for the nonsense we have been hearing, but it does not represent anything like a majority of the public at this time.

So to recap, we have “no horse in this race,” we should do nothing, we have to negotiate with whichever government emerges, and the victory of the reformers would change nothing about Iran’s nuclear program and “would not stop the country’s rivalry with the United States,” all of which “hard-core non-interventionists” have already been saying for days and days, but it is “naive” to say that an internal Iranian political dispute is really none of our business. Okay, then. It’s not really clear what makes one the hard-headed realist position and the other the naive non-interventionist one, as the two are identical positions. One thing I have noticed in this debate is that virtually everyone has been lobbing the charge of naivete at everyone else, including people who agree with them on 99% of the policy substance, which tells me that there isn’t very much to the charge