The Economist’s Democracy in America blog joins the Iran debate:

What strikes me is that it is of little import what Iran debate we have. The question of what stance the American government adopted towards the Green Movement was always moderately peripheral [bold mine-DL]. We are now arguing not about what stance to adopt towards Iran, but about what stance to adopt towards members of our own political elite who have argued for various stances towards Iran.

These are two very good points. This is why it has always seemed to me that the degree of outrage one expresses against the Iranian regime or the degree of sympathy one expresses for the regime’s victims has little bearing on the merits of the different policy options before us. The administration correctly responded to the protests last summer with a hands-off approach, recognizing that there was little or nothing constructive they could do, and a lot of this was treated as weakness and “appeasement” by the administration’s domestic foes. Of course, when there is nothing for the administration to do it is beyond absurd to criticize it for not having done enough. What administration critics wanted was for Obama to express the correct attitude and strike the right pose. They wanted him to show that he cares, when his concern or lack of it is of absolutely no help to the regime’s opponents. Lacking any practical means to aid the Green movement or influence events in Iran (thanks in part to three decades of cutting the U.S. off from Iran), movement sympathizers seem to want a lot of sentimentality as a substitute for offering a workable policy alternative. This is what it seems like Crowley and many of the Leveretts’ other critics want from the Leveretts.

Responding to something I wrote last week, Patrick Appel says this is not so:

I am not asking the Leveretts to pound the table over human rights abuses in Iran. I am asking them to wrestle with these tragedies and explain why they don’t impact their analysis.

Perhaps we are talking past one another, because it doesn’t make much sense why regime crimes would actually have much bearing on the available policy options. Washington has made strategically valuable bargains with authoritarian states several times in the past, and our government has done this with regimes that were vastly more repressive, violent and cruel. The opening to China has served both U.S. and Chinese interests reasonably well, and the Chinese people have benefited some from this as well, and none of this would have happened had our government been swayed by the objection that the Chinese government at that time had been killing hundreds of thousands of its own people for years. Out of necessity or interest, we have forged alliances with some genuinely awful Arab and Central Asian regimes as well. Where then does the horrified reaction to negotiating with Iran come from?

This is all the more frustrating because making a comprehensive settlement with Iran is the best and the most realistic option there is. Trying to build up Iran’s opposition or wait for its eventual success is a waste of effort and time that we cannot really afford. Stratfor’s George Friedman (via Race for Iran) commented on the prospects for political change in Iran in an important essay on Iran policy:

One attempt at redefinition involves hope for an uprising against the current regime. We will not repeat our views on this in depth, but in short, we do not regard these demonstrations to be a serious threat to the regime. Tehran has handily crushed them, and even if they did succeed, we do not believe they would produce a regime any more accommodating toward the United States.

Friedman proposes instead a deal based on shared interests:

Now consider the overlaps. The United States is in a war against some (not all) Sunnis. These are Iran’s enemies, too. Iran does not want U.S. troops along its eastern and western borders. In point of fact, the United States does not want this either. The United States does not want any interruption of oil flow through Hormuz. Iran much prefers profiting from those flows to interrupting them. Finally, the Iranians understand that it is the United States alone that is Iran’s existential threat. If Iran can solve the American problem its regime survival is assured. The United States understands, or should, that resurrecting the Iraqi counterweight to Iran is not an option: It is either U.S. forces in Iraq or accepting Iran’s unconstrained role.