This is a handy table from last November that provides a more precise picture of what would be required for a Republican takeover of the House.  As the table shows, even a 48% result could leave the Democrats with a majority.  If we look at the generic ballot poll from Rasmussen, whose likely voter screen is the most favorable to Republicans, we find that Republicans have a wide lead but register only 44% support.  “Not sure” and “other” receive 14% and 6% respectively.  According to the poll, 37% of independents are unsure which party they will support or say they prefer a third option.  Republicans have 45% of  independents, which is as well as they have done with this group in the last year, but despite the large number of independents unwilling to state their support for the Democrats the GOP is not winning them over.  As disaffected as these independents have become, they have not yet moved into the Republican column, and this is not surprising.  It was overwhelmingly these voters who fled from the GOP in the last four years, and they have not forgotten the reasons why they did this.

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.

Alex Massie noticed this statement by Roger Ailes:

I see myself between the Hudson River and the Sierra Madres. I do not see myself at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel or Le Cirque here in New York. Those are people who aspire to different things. They’re the chattering class. They’re the people who think Ahmadinejad wants to have a chat with us and that we haven’t been reaching out to him enough. No, actually, Ahmadinejad wants to cut our heads off and blow us up with nuclear weapons. He’s made that clear. There is something about those people that makes them think, “Oh, he’s just kidding.” No, he’s not kidding. He wants to kill us.

I tend to be a realist about things.

I agree entirely with Massie that this is “a frothing silliness that is almost hysterically unrealistic,” and he is also correct that all that is accomplished by inflating and exaggerating an Iranian threat like this is to make Ahmadinejad and his allies seem much more powerful than they are. What I would like to add is that Iran hawks such as Ailes are apparently entirely oblivious to how much they resemble the picture of Ahmadinejad that they have painted. After all, Ailes and those like him quite openly support launching unprovoked attacks on Iran, they make no secret of their contempt and loathing for Iran’s leaders, and they routinely urge an economic war aimed at destabilizing Iran’s government. If anything, Iran hawks in the U.S. have been far more explicit in expressing their willingness to inflict catastrophic destruction on Iran than Iranian hard-liners have been.

That doesn’t mean Iranian hard-liners aren’t aggressive and very accustomed to using force to get what they want, but it is a reminder that the vast majority of threats of war and national “obliteration” in the last decade has come from our side. Political candidates, elected representatives and commentators in the media have made these threats. Back in 2002, the President himself targeted the Iranian government for elimination. Ahmadinejad might very well want to kill us, but he does not have the luxury to say so openly, nor does he have the means to do it. Not that it will matter to Ailes, but in his public statements with respect to nuclear weapons Ahmadinejad regularly claims that he does not want Iran to pursue nuclear weapons. Few believe him, and I certainly don’t, but Ailes can’t even get this most basic fact right. It would be one thing if “the chattering class” dismissed something that Ahmadinejad actually said, but what Ailes really means is that “the chattering class” doesn’t endorse Ailes’ own paranoid fantasy about the Iranian threat.

To appreciate fully how relatively badly the Tories are doing right now, we need to remember that the Blair-Brown government has been to Britain what Bush and the GOP were to the United States. If someone had told you in October 2008 after the financial crisis and during the onset of a major recession that the public was seriously considering electing McCain and giving the majority in both houses to the Republicans, you would have rightly regarded him as a madman. That is how crazy the idea of a Labour victory ought to seem to us today, but it is now quite possible that Labour will emerge from the next general election as the largest party and the head of a governing coalition. For a more accurate comparison, imagine an alternate world in which the Republicans never lost their majorities and Cheney was the 2008 Republican nominee and he won. That is what another five years for Labour would be like.

There are a few things to take away from this. First, center-right parties that cannot muster the conviction to defend the spending cuts that they are absolutely right must me made will quickly lose the public’s trust. Voters may sooner reward profligate incompetents than they will entrust power to an opposition that has no credibility on a central issue of the election. Brown is certainly hoping that they will. This means that there is no guarantee of victory by default. Republicans who hope to benefit politically from bad economic times and a flailing majority party should take note that the Tories have almost grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory against a vastly more unpopular government. If the Tories can squander a 10-point lead in a matter of weeks, the GOP can very easily squander its small generic ballot lead in the next eight months.

Something else we can learn is that complete shamelessness in the face of a record of monumental failure may succeed against all odds. As Massie observes:

Sure, common-sense demands that we laugh at any Brownite claim that Gordon is a “safe pair of hands” but that’s what he’s pitching. If you’re bold and brassy enough perhaps you can get away with anything.

Third, stylistic re-branding in the absence of a coherent, consistent message and workable policy proposals will eventually implode thanks to its own insubstantiality. The Cameroons have been very good at the first part, and the GOP might learn a thing or two from them, but they have not done very well at all on the other. Massie’s description of the way Cameron is perceived gets to part of the Tories’ problem. Cameron is seen as being “[d]ecent, amiable, brightish, but, in some sense, lacking bottom.” One is reminded of the Urquhart line about the PM he was attempting to oust: “His deepest need was that people should like him. An admirable enough trait in a spaniel…but not, I think, in a Prime Minister.” The drive to make Tories seem likeable has oddly enough deprived them of their reputation for harshness and toughness that they may need at the present time more than they have needed it in two decades.

Finally, the possibility of approaching Tory failure in a fourth straight general election should make Republicans reflect on how long they might be kept out of power. The time it takes to rebuild trust that was squandered during years of misrule and failure may take as long a period as the party was in power. The memory of Tory failures in the 1990s has been so strong and the inability of the Tories to recover has been so great that they may not be able to capitalize on their best electoral opportunity in a generation. That should make Republicans start doing a lot more thinking about how they are going to compete against a party and a President that are still more popular than they are.

Just because a fact is not convenient to the argument at hand does not mean you can disregard said fact. Ignoring the strongest evidence against a position opens one to charges of intellectual dishonesty and does not move the debate forward. It’s intellectually lazy and it damages the discourse. ~Patrick Appel

What is this “strongest evidence” that the Leveretts have ignored? Initially, the Leveretts questioned the extremely easy assumption that massive fraud must have taken place. So did the analysts at Stratfor. Since then, they have not disputed that there was fraud, but have argued that it was not enough to change the outcome. In the last month, PIPA released a report at WorldPublicOpinion.org that provided evidence that helped explain how Ahmadinejad could have won the first round outright while also believing before the election that he would need to resort to fraud to secure victory. Oddly enough, the report has more than a few similarities with Jonathan Bernstein’s latest post on Watergate.

One can raise objections to the WPO report, but for the most part its release has been greeted with silence. Appel does not address this evidence, which one might call the “strongest evidence” against his belief that Ahmadinejad did not win outright, so I could say that he was ignoring the “strongest evidence” against his position. I could say that he was committing the same error he condemns. That would be the most uncharitable interpretation possible, and it would get us nowhere, but it would be a useful rhetorical trick. I don’t think Appel is actually ignoring contrary evidence. My guess is that he has already taken contrary evidence into account and he has decided for any of a number of reasons to focus on something else.

The other problem Appel has with the Leveretts is that he says that they have ignored Iranian regime crimes. One might ask what they are supposed to say about them that would satisfy their critics. When they have attempted to provide perspective and compare them with larger, more brutal crackdowns, as analysts should, they have been accused of being heartless pro-regime shills. As Kevin Sullivan says:

I’m not sure what would sufficiently qualify as recognizing the crimes of the Iranian regime here; the Leveretts have absolutely acknowledged the regime’s brutality [bold mine-DL]. Their point is not that violence hasn’t occurred, but that the government has yet to crack down with the full capacity and brutality at its disposal.

Advocates of engagement have recognized the crimes of the Iranian regime, but some of us still believe engagement is the most realistic and correct course despite these crimes. If advocates of engagement do not devote a large amount of space to denouncing regime crimes, which everyone finds atrocious and wrong, perhaps it is because we realize that our outrage will do nothing for the regime’s victims. Perhaps it is because we have seen how stoking moral outrage against another government has been used many times in the past to justify destructive policies that will intensify the suffering and difficulties of the people. How many thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis would still be alive and how many millions of Iraqis would never have been displaced had we been more concerned with getting our policy towards Iraq right and less concerned with denouncing Hussein’s atrocities (and using them as fodder for war propaganda)? Appel may not agree with this approach, but he should bear it in mind before he concludes that advocates of engagement such as the Leveretts have not recognized and acknowledged regime crimes.

One can envision a democratically-elected Iranian government that pursues nuclear weapons, offers rhetorical support to Hamas and Hezbollah, but also enjoys better relations with the U.S. and the international community, because democracies, all other things being equal, can be expected to be less reckless and inconsistent. ~Shadi Hamid

Via Kevin Sullivan

It is worth noting that Hamid does not quote or address the part of my argument that already anticipated this objection. One of the main points I was making was that the military establishment and IRGC will likely remain in place no matter what form the civilian government takes. If that were the case, it would not be the civilian government with its “larger number of people” and “more veto points” that would have the final say on matters of national security and foreign policy. As in Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, in Turkey, a democratic Iranian government would be significantly constrained in its formation of security and foreign policies by the political and economic power of military institutions. One could say that this is an improvement over the status quo, but the practical difference would be negligible. In the end, the same institutions that shape Iranian policy today would most likely remain as they are.

It is also quite easy to envision a democratic Iran whose government sees a nuclear arsenal and support for proxies in Lebanon and Palestine as strategically necessary things. It was the formally democratic government of Pakistan that encouraged the rise of the Taliban as part of its strategy of competing for influence in Afghanistan. It was a democratic Pakistani government that tested nuclear weapons and it was under the same government that Pakistan started the Kargil war. Of course, one can object that it was really the military that was the driving force behind all of this and that the civilian government had no choice but to accede to the wishes of the military, but that is just the point I was originally making.

Besides, if we review the last ten years, can we really say that it has been the democracies of the world that have been “less reckless” in the use of military force? One can make the argument that Georgia was actually ruled by a demagogue with authoritarian instincts, but the “democratically-elected government” of Georgia embarked on an extremely reckless course of action in its escalation of the conflict with the separatist republics. Our own government launched one of the more reckless, ill-considered wars of aggression in postwar history, and over a dozen other democratic states supported the action with many committing substantial forces of their own. The Israeli public was united behind an escalation of the 2006 Lebanon war that proved to be very unwise. Thaksin engaged in a heavy-handed, counterproductive “drug war” in the south of the country that contributed to the military’s decision to remove him from power.

Some of these democratic governments were relatively new, and others were mature, well-established democracies. There does not seem to have been anything in their democratic political systems that could have made these errors less likely. If most democracies do not resort to these methods, there does not seem to be anything inherent in democratic regimes that is responsible for this. Indeed, all of the alleged safeguards that democracies are supposed to provide to prevent reckless, ill-considered and arbitrary military action completely failed in at least three of these cases. Far from being a check on recklessness, broad popular consent emboldened all four governments to take action without fully thinking through the consequences.

P.S. I would also add that the reverse of Hamid’s claim about democracies does not seem to apply very well to authoritarian governments. Most authoritarian governments seem to be highly predictable and unwilling to take many unnecessary risks. Then again, one could make this observation about most governments regardless of regime type, which should make us question whether there is anything specific to a democratic system that prevents recklessness.

There have been several responses to the Lowry/Ponnuru essay on American exceptionalism. Damon Linker’s is particularly withering, and Conor has written a very effective rebuttal as well, but the best is probably from Democracy in America (via Scoblete):

Ranking all countries on these subscores, America comes in a multi-way tie for 30th place. So according to a respected NGO often considered to be on the centre-right (though the board is politically diverse), America is not the freest country in the world, or most democratic. It isn’t second or third either. It’s merely in the top tier.

This is the most effective response because it cuts the legs out from under the self-congratulatory hegemonist boasting that is at the heart of the essay. It is important to remember that lurking behind most arguments on behalf of “American exceptionalism” is a demand for unending American hegemony and supremacy. This seems especially true of mainstream conservative arguments on this score. To the extent that Obama does not indulge in self-congratulatory bluster and arrogant hectoring of other nations, they find his embrace of American exceptionalism to be insufficient or non-existent.

What might be worth considering is how much ground America has lost at home in terms of freedom, democracy, individualism, openness and dynamism while we have been vainly pursuing the role of hegemon and would-be democratizer of the world. Maybe even twenty years ago the claim that America was “freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth” could have withstood scrutiny. Now it is rapidly becoming something that nationalists tell one another to keep their spirits up.

Part of the change is a measure of the genuine expansion of these goods in other parts of the world. There is more and better competition, so to speak, than there used to be, and at the same time we have been stagnating or regressing. That is something Americans can take pride in for our part in helping to make that happen, but it also means that we cannot continue to congratulate ourselves for a unique and superior status that we have long since ceased to have. This should also teach us that we need to return to a patriotism that does not boast and does not need to boast of the greatness of our country.

The certainty that ours is the best country in every significant political and economic category blinds us to admitting errors that need to be corrected, and the obsession with national greatness distracts us with power projection and coercion as substitutes for the building and maintaining of the foundations of a prosperous, self-governing republic. While we have been minding everyone else’s business, we have been neglecting our own. If we would have America be exceptionally free, prosperous and creative, we need to concentrate far more of our attention and resources on America, and we need to manage those resources far more prudently and carefully. The good news in being behind so many other free, flourishing nations in these rankings is that it tells us that they have the means to take care of their own problems and will manage just fine on their own.

The Lowry/Ponnuru essay was a more elaborate expression of the same inane “We’re #1!” rhetoric that Marco Rubio offered up to CPAC last month. As we have already seen, Rubio’s grasp of both domestic and foreign affairs was lacking, and his boasts of unique and superior American economic strength and opportunity bore little relationship to reality. In its key claim that America is superior in all these ways, the essay is similarly detached from the way things are today. Like Rubio’s speech, the essay describes a struggle between those who would preserve this exaggerated American greatness and those who would destroy it. Rubio claimed that the fate of the nation’s identity would be decided in the upcoming election. Lowry and Ponnuru are not quite so ridiculous as to say this, but they do claim that there is an “assault” on American identity underway that will result in changing our national character.

As Conor points out, Obama not only embraces American exceptionalism (as I havesaid for a while), but he also did so in the very same speech that Lowry and Ponnuru, along with countless others, have cited in their attempt to prove the opposite. This is what Obama’s mainstream conservative critics have been doing for the last year: they take one phrase that they don’t like, ignore the rest of Obama’s remarks in the same speech, and concoct entire theories on Obama’s view of the world from that one phrase. The myth of the “apology tour” had its origin in this kind of misrepresentation. When Obama acknowledged that Americans had indulged a lot of cheap anti-European sentiment in recent years, his critics never admitted that he had denounced “insidious” anti-Americanism on the European side in the next breath. Lowry and Ponnuru returned to an old favorite of critics who invented the “apology tour.” They specifically focused on Obama’s refusal to take Daniel Ortega’s bait. Rather than dignify the ridiculous Marxist’s tirade at the Summit of the Americas with a direct response, which Lowry, Ponnuru and their colleagues seem to have desperately wanted, Obama effectively dismissed Ortega as the irrelevant demagogue that he is. Nonetheless, Obama remains far too wedded to the idea of the necessity of American “leadership,” and so to some extent he still partakes of the American exceptionalism that Andrew Bacevich identified as part of the ideology of national security.

Of course, Lowry and Ponnuru cannot actually point to very much on national security policy that they dislike*, which is why they are reduced to whining about the non-response to Ortega, and spend most of their time complaining about the attempted transformation of America with still more intrusive domestic government. Even so, they are convinced that they are seeing the “waning of America’s civilizational self-confidence,” which worries them because it means we might be less willing to kill foreigners for no good reason mount the “forward defense of freedom.”

This is where their essay, like the Mount Vernon statement last month, becomes most incoherent. If we take seriously their charge that Obama and his agenda represent a departure from American tradition and an embrace of social democracy, and if we agree that we should resist this in the name of defending that which is distinctively American, what are we to make of the national security state whose interests and actions the likes of Lowry and Ponnuru routinely defend? The security and warfare state is no less and actually far more alien to these shores than any entitlement program. It is far more dangerous to the constitutional government that truly was one of the most admirable achievements of our ancestors, and it goes against the grain of most of our national history. A huge standing army, military outposts scattered around the globe, perpetual war and the arbitrary use of force by executive order–are these really compatible with the national character Lowry, Ponnuru and Rubio claim to cherish? Of course they are not, which reminds us that their dedication here is no more meaningful than that of most of the would-be “constitutionalist conservatives” who gathered near Mount Vernon.

* Obama and the Democrats did just approve PATRIOT Act reauthorization shortly after this essay came out. I eagerly await the pained cries of protest from all those “constitutionalist conservatives” and defenders of American identity we have been hearing from lately.

Yes, it’s childish [bold mine-DL], but being veterans of Washington, you understand that the fastest way your (already unpopular) line of analysis can be discredited is if it is shown that you harbor real sympathies for the current crop of Iranian rulers [bold mine-DL], and not just an unsentimental view of engagement or a hyper-skeptical view of the Green Movement. ~Greg Scoblete

I’m not sure why professionals should have to indulge this childish game, but Scoblete does make a fair point. No one should be more familiar with the tropes and tricks of journalists and pundits working in the service of the Washington foreign policy consensus than the critics of that consensus, and so the critics have to be especially mindful of how even perfectly legitimate and accurate observations will be misrepresented and twisted into endorsements of authoritarian governments. I suppose it is too much to expect that policy debate could focus primarily on the merits and flaws of different policy options. Unfortunately, striking the right pose and expressing an officially acceptable attitude are at least as important as espousing a policy position that makes sense and would actually advance U.S. interests.

When it comes to Iran, it is clear that expressing the right amount of antipathy for the regime is far more important than anything else one has to say. This is why foolish people who want to impose gasoline sanctions on Iran, which would greatly aid the regime against its internal opponents, can be taken seriously as “anti-regime” figures while opponents of such sanctions are suspected of being in league with Tehran. It is madness, but that is the way things are. Even though the “anti-regime” solution of sanctions will likely make the regime even more hard-line and even harder to dislodge from power, sanctions advocates display the right feelings, and apparently this makes most people ignore the fatal flaws in the policy they support. If one does not go through the motions of ritual condemnation, empty posturing and the endorsement of counterproductive-but-“tough” action, one is not considered a “serious” participant in the debate.

Nonetheless, I think it is important not to make many major concessions to conventional views about another state, especially when these views inform confrontational and aggressive policies. Before the invasion of Iraq, most opponents of the invasion felt compelled to hedge their statements with endless qualifications, they had to accept the reality of a non-existent WMD threat simply to participate in the conversation, and they often had to go out of their way to state their loathing and disgust for Saddam Hussein. As I have said many times before, this had the effect of undermining antiwar arguments from the very beginning. Having conceded that Hussein was a monster whose downfall they would happily welcome, and having accepted the key claim of the pro-war side that Iraq possessed WMDs and posed a grave threat to us all, many opponents of the war lost the debate before they had even stated their correct case that the war would be a strategic disaster and a terrible mistake. They allowed themselves to be psyched out by the cheap moralizing and shoddy reasoning of war supporters. These war opponents were desperately trying to avoid the smears that were already being used, but all they achieved was to deprive their arguments of whatever moral and rhetorical force they might have had.

Crowley’s article is so infuriating because at no time does he show that the Leveretts have anything like “real sympathies” for Ahmadinejad or anyone else in the Iranian government. He implies sinister things based on fairly innocent observations by the Leveretts (e.g., Ahmadinejad is an effective retail campaigner) that no reasonable person could regard as damning in the least. Despite this slipshod treatment of their views, it is the Leveretts’ unwillingness to play Crowley’s game that captures the most attention. We will never have a perfect world, but we can certainly have foreign policy debate that is much better than the one we have right now.

My main problem with the Leveretts is, like certain hawks, they project a false sense of certainty about the situation in Iran. No one knows exactly how the opposition movement will manifest [bold mine-DL]. The Leveretts assert arguable claims as fact without explaining how they are reaching their conclusions. ~Patrick Appel

The claims the Leveretts have made about the presidential election are substantially no different than those made by Stratfor analysts from the very beginning. All of them have made reasonable arguments that Mousavi voters in general and Green movement protesters in particular do not represent anything like a majority of the population, and they have made fairly common-sense observations that the Green movement has been losing strength as time goes on. Skeptics of the movement’s strength have also cast doubt on claims that the regime is widely seen as illegitimate by most Iranians. These claims have been central to the latest wave of regime change arguments, which have focused on helping the protest movement bring down the government, and the claims are probably wrong. The skeptics’ doubt is informed by what little apparently reliable evidence about Iranian public opinion we have. Compared with this admittedly sketchy and incomplete picture, the Leveretts’ critics cannot muster much more than anecdotal evidence whose importance they continually exaggerate.

No one has obsessively attacked George Friedman et al. as regime apologists or “intellectual defenders” of Ahmadinejad. It seems to me that the Leveretts aren’t being targeted with smears and insults principally because of their analysis, which Crowley does not really attempt to dispute, but because of the policy course they recommend, which is significant, sustained engagement with Iran. What Leveretts’ critics seem to want to do is identify this engagement approach with sympathy and collusion with the regime. This is the same thing that some of the Leveretts’ harshest critics were trying to do when they were attacking Trita Parsi as lobbyist for the regime.

Should skeptics of the Green movement be more careful to qualify our claims? Perhaps. It is true that it is difficult to know what is happening inside Iran, but given these limitations shouldn’t it count in favor of the skeptics that we seem to have understood the balance of political forces in Iran much better than Green movement sympathizers and most Iran hawks? If skeptics have seemed a little too sure about things, how ridiculously overconfident have many other observers been? Have the latter been right about much of anything so far? On balance, whose arguments seem to be more in accord with reality? Shouldn’t that be the relevant measure in gauging the merits of what the Leveretts have had to say?