The West has a lot at stake in the outcome of the Iranian crisis. Were the regime to fall, a Green successor government–most likely to be headed by Messrs. Mousavi and Karroubi for at least a while–would end support for terrorism in such hot spots as Iraq and Afghanistan and, at a minimum, cut back on the deals that the Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Ahmadinejad have made with Venezuela, Syria and Turkey. ~Michael Ledeen

This is comical stuff. What we do know of Mousavi’s views on Iranian foreign policy tells us that none of this is certain and most of it is highly unlikely. Much would depend on the structure of the next government and the role of the military and IRGC in influencing policy, but even if a Green government could come to power without having to make any concessions to the military and security forces it is not at all obvious that it would end its support for militias in Iraq. Why would it? Because that is the friendly, pro-American thing to do? It would have even less reason to scale back agreements with these or any other states. Ledeen would like to see these things happen, and so he claims without any support that they would happen under a Green government.

Concerning the most recent deal negotiated with Turkey, Mehdi Khalaji pointed out that Mousavi has attacked the fuel-swap agreement because it conceded too much:

Yet despite the introverted nature of their struggle, both sides recognize the potential domestic political impact of a nuclear agreement — even the controversial trilateral Turkey-Brazil-Iran proposal — with the international community. The leaders of the opposition Green Movement are against such a development, believing that any deal with the current regime would lend legitimacy to Ahmadinezhad’s presidency and weaken their pro-democracy movement. Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of last year’s presidential candidates and now an opposition leader, disapproved strongly of both the October 2009 and May 2010 fuel-swap proposals for the Tehran Research Reactor. He even described last month’s Turkey/Brazil-brokered agreement as “another Treaty of Turkmenchay” [bold mine-DL] (an 1828 accord with Russia signed by an incompetent Iranian king and seen as humiliating to Iran).

The opposition believes it has a vested interest in the failure of any nuclear agreements negotiated by the current government, but it is going to frame its criticism in terms that make the opposition seem like the true defenders of Iranian sovereignty and national rights. The current government isn’t going to fall anytime soon, and there would be no way of knowing for sure what any successor government would like or what it would do, but what we know about Mousavi from his record and his current positions tells us that he may feel obliged to be less compromising on security and foreign policy issues than Ahmadinejad.

In almost any country, policy continuity from one administration to another is the rule. If the opposition’s leaders remain as committed to the legacy of the Islamic revolution as they seem to be, any government headed by them would still be working within a policy consensus that will not permit them to make radical, sudden changes in foreign policy orientation. To the extent that there are meaningful differences on foreign policy between the government and opposition leaders, these are disagreements over tactics and methods rather than sharp divisions over policy goals. Trusting in the accommodating attitude of a future Green government that may never come into existence is not an Iran policy. It is an illusion designed to mislead Americans into believing that many of the difficulties in U.S.-Iranian relations can simply be eliminated without any concessions on the part of our government.