Erik Kain rallies to Scott Brown’s defense:

While the op-ed doesn’t address spending issues explicitly, it’s not as though Republicans or Brown in particular are calling for more spending. Perhaps spending cuts aren’t the best idea in the midst of a recession any more than hiking taxes. Additionally, one of the reasons Brown states for his opposition to the healthcare reform bill is its increased spending and tax burden. Perhaps he should also be proposing ways to cut current spending, but certainly there is nothing inconsistent with opposing future spending either.

Here’s what Erik is missing and what Andrew found so irritating about the op-ed: Brown opens by listing his his concerns, including his concern over our $12 trillion in debt, and then urges tax-cutting without stating how this would even begin to address this massive debt. Fiscal conservatism isn’t a combination of the endless desire for tax reduction and lip service to mounting debt. Fiscal conservatives recognize large public debt to be a cause of economic weakness. Debt reduction is as much a part of any “pro-growth” policy as tax-cutting. Debt reduction has just as much to do with controlling the size of government as cutting taxes does. That Republicans predictably always prefer the latter is a source of increasing frustration for all of us on the right who would like to see both some glimmer of intelligence in Republican policy proposals and some readiness to address policy problems that exist today rather than addressing the problems that existed in 1981.

Absent significant increases in revenue to begin paying off that debt, tax reductions are a means to buy short-term support at the expense of our long-term fiscal and economic health. In Brown’s case, I suspect that one reason he included his “across-the-board tax cut” proposal in this particular op-ed is that he wanted to find some way to invoke John Kennedy and tie himself to the famous Massachusetts dynasty whose seat, of course, he will not be filling. Fiscal conservatives should find this much debt abhorrent because of the economic burden it places on the present and the obligations it imposes on our posterity, but other than saying “no more stimulus!” Brown tells us nothing about how he would work to reduce the debt. What bothers Andrew, and what I think moves him to dub Brown’s op-ed as “mindless,” is the readiness to exploit voter discontent over public debt without any willingness to propose how to pay it off, especially when it was his party at the national level that racked up a majority of that debt. Reflexive Republican opposition to new spending would not be so hard to take seriously if there were any sign that national Republicans were trying to eliminate the debt they and their predecessors left us. There are few signs of this, and Brown is not giving us any reason to think he takes this problem seriously.

Granted, this is a candidate’s op-ed the week before an election. No one expects him to lay out a detailed budget proposal. After all, even the House Republican leadership has difficulty doing that during budget negotiations! Brown is also running in Massachusetts, so I wouldn’t expect him to make radical calls for eliminating entitlement programs. Brown does at least save us the irritation of telling us how all of our budgets problems can be fixed by cutting out “wasteful spending” and earmarks, but he could offer one or two examples of a progam or department he thinks could be reduced or abolished. As it is, there is nothing.

Where I think the charge of “Romney-like cynicism” sticks is in Brown’s desire to have it both ways on health care. He voted for MassCare, which means that he endorsed the state’s individual insurance mandate, and now that he is trying to leave town he makes noises about controlling cost, which was something the legislature did not even attempt to address when the bill passed. Controlling cost is something a system with a universal mandate cannot do.

The federal legislation Brown opposes is not that different from the Massachusetts bill he supported. He sees the federal bill as a fiscal disaster, so how can he really say that he still supports the state system when it shares some of the flaws of the federal legislation he rejects? He says this because he assumes MassCare is popular enough in the state and because he is on record supporting it, but he also knows that he cannot possibly win Republican and conservative backing if he gave any hint that he might support Democratic health care legislation in Washington. The trouble here is that he does not admit that supporting MassCare was mistaken, as he might, nor does he say that he has learned from the flawed product the state legislature created, which might help make sense of his record and his current position on the federal bill. Instead, he wants to have it all by retaining his moderate Republican record to assuage uncertain independent voters while affirming his party-line opposition to the federal health care bill.

Come to think of it, this is not quite Romney-like cynicism, because at least Romney has pretended to change positions as electoral circumstances demanded. Brown is trying to occupy both sides of the health care debate at the same time even as he seems to claim that there is no contradiction in doing so. Both Massachusetts voters and national Republicans have reason to wonder which side he will eventually take when it comes time to vote on the bill. Most likely, as a freshman Senator he will fall in line with whatever the leadership says. He is being quite plain about his opposition to the federal bill, but I wonder whether voters will find his inevitable party-line voting to be at odds with his claim to represent “all independent-thinking citizens.”

David Brooks is right that culture and habits matter, but this one line rang false:

There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.

Of course, it seems odd to count the first part of this statement against practitioners of voodoo at the present time, since a natural disaster is one of the most obvious ways in which we see the capriciousness of life on display, but more important it seems to me that Brooks’ description simply gets voodoo wrong. He is describing these beliefs as if they were fatalistic, when practitioners of voodoo believe that they can use their rites to influence things and be empowered.

There is also something about this remark that reminds me of old, fairly absurd stereotypes of Catholic societies as stagnant and uncreative. Haitians are also overwhelmingly Catholic, and many of them practice voodoo as well, but why should we assume that their religious practices are the destructive influences in their society? Isn’t it just as plausible that the social function of voodoo is attempt to reclaim some power over circumstances amid misfortunes and adversity? Viewed in that way, it could be seen at the very least as a socially stabilizing mechanism for coping with life’s burdens. The line rang false all the more because it was followed by the far more significant observation that “[t]here are high levels of social mistrust.” When trying to discern reasons for social dysfunction and weak institutions, social mistrust would seem to be the overwhelmingly more relevant factor. Further, it is probably the case that shared religious beliefs are a source of social solidarity and cohesion, and so would potentially be a means of building social trust, which would make such beliefs part of any larger solution.

Andrew:

The Netanyahu government has all but declared war on the Obama administration and then openly disses a vital ally, Turkey.

The Netanyahu government certainly shares in the blame for the deterioration in relations with both Washington and Ankara, but there are several factors here that this statement obscures. First of all, the Netanyahu government is not Israel, and it does not represent all of Israel, so the attitude problem Andrew identifies is not “Israel’s attitude,” but the attitude of a government whose largest two parties received a distinct minority of the vote at the last election. After Lieberman was given the foreign affairs portfolio, we had to expect that the conduct of Israeli foreign policy was going to become more combative, short-sighted and reckless. Lieberman is proving to be a perfect foil for Erdogan’s demagogic posturing on foreign policy and the growing anti-Israel sentiment in the Turkish public. Israelis can see the results of this kind of foreign policy, and it seems unlikely that they are going to reward it. Already the government is being excoriated for its incompetence:

The Israeli media on Thursday slammed the government’s handling of a diplomatic row with Turkey in which it humiliated Ankara’s ambassador and then retreated with public apologies.

Incredibly, the one Israeli paper that has come to the defense of Ayalon and Lieberman has been Ha’aretz on the grounds that the pair were defending national honor!

Turkish-Israeli relations have been in decline since at least 2006. That increasingly negative sentiment in Turkey did not come out of nowhere, nor is it simply the product of AKP propaganda or of the “eastern” or “Islamic” tilt of Turkish policy. Prior to the war in Lebanon, which was extremely unpopular in Turkey, Erdogan’s government enjoyed reasonably good relations with Israel. Even before the Gaza operation, Erdogan was operating as a trusted go-between with Syria. Gaza was really the turning point, when Erdogan felt that he had been deceived by Olmert during the days leading up to Cast Lead. The Turkish PM saw the Gaza operation as being partly timed to sabotage his efforts as a mediator with Syria. The operation itsef incensed Turkish opinion, and Erdogan played to the crowd as he always does.

Things continued to spiral downwards with the confronation at Davos, and relations worsened even more after the provocative decision to exclude Israel from joint military exercises. Even if we want to say that this decision was as much a part of Erdogan’s jockeying for position against the military at home as it was an insult to Israel, the effect was the same. It is not as if the “dissing” has been all in one direction. Naturally, most “pro-Israel” commentators are going to view the last few years as an uninterrupted string of Turkish attacks on a blameless Israel, which is absurd, but that doesn’t mean that the opposite view of a blameless Turkey is correct. A major part of the problem is that Israel is acting as if it has all the advantages in the relationship and as if Turkey needs Israel more than Israel needs Turkey. This is a horrible misreading of the situation in the region. Turkey has been improving its relations and deepening commercial ties with all of its neighbors, and Israel has been doing almost the exact opposite. Minor disputes and diplomatic rows happen even between allies, but Israel does not have the same luxury of damaging its relationship with Turkey that Turkey has in poking fingers in Israel’s eye.

The television series that sparked the row in question, Valley of the Wolves, contained elements that would understandably offend Israelis. By itself, the issue seems a trivial one as a matter of international relations, but when viewed against this background of deepening mistrust and anger it is easier to see why the Israeli government wanted to slight the Turkish ambassador. With someone such as Lieberman in charge of the Israeli foreign ministry, the television show served as the perfect sort of symbolic problem nationalists love to exploit for their own purposes. The purpose of such exercises is not to accomplish anything valuable, but to engage in public theatrics of outrage to demonstrate to one’s core supporters that you are defending national honor. Of couse, in this case it backfired when Ankara escalated the row. If our State Department were run by similarly incompetent, boorish types, our government might have engaged in the same kind of pettiness over the content of Metal Storm. The problem is that Turkey might have to put up with such behavior from Washington, but increasingly it does not have to endure even minor mistreatment from Israel.

As for U.S.-Israel relations, yes, the Netanyahu government has resisted the administration on settlement policy, but the administration deserves some criticism for how it handled all of this. If the administration had been serious in its desire to pressure Israel on this point, it would have been willing to take the necessary steps to apply pressure to Israel’s government. It should at least have been willing to say that it might take such steps, but that was a confrontation Obama evidently did not want to have. As it turned out, the administration was not willing to take the political risks to follow through, Netanyahu called his bluff, and the settlement freeze proposal died. Netanyahu leads a coalition of mostly nationalist parties, and parties of all governments have supported settlement expansion in defiance of all agreements, so the Israeli response was not only predictable but virtually inevitable. Obama gave the impression he wanted to take on Netanyahu, which was surprising, and Netanyahu made just enough of a concession to appear cooperative without having given up anything. Having met resistance, Obama stopped, and meanwhile Netanyahu has consolidated public support at home.

If Netanyahu and his government have a bad attitude, Obama has shown no desire to do what would be required to change it. Meanwhile, this attitude is a gift to Erdogan, whose demagoguery will continue to yield political benefits for him and his party at home.

Now — Scott Brown has run as a conservative candidate, and not a moderate, and isn’t terribly popular with the GOP establishment. That makes him all the more attractive to the anti-establishment factions in the TP movement. There are plenty of Tea Partiers who want to buck the two party system, and plenty more who wouldn’t support a pro-choicer, but there seem to be more than a bucketful of them who want to leverage their energy into getting Republicans elected to Congress — Republicans who can be counted on to block the Democratic Party’s agenda. ~Marc Ambinder

The interesting thing is that the activist support for Scott Brown seems to be somewhat different from the inexplicably nationalized nature of Hoffman’s campaign and the overwhelmingly national sources of his support. Instead of fitting the cookie-cutter model of the nationally-acceptable, talk radio-approved conservative, Scott Brown seems more suited to and interested in the state he wants to represent. Despite being pretty much a classic moderate Massachusetts Republican in the Weld-Romney mold, he seems to be winning Tea Party and movement activist support, and he seems to be winning it because he has a better-than-expected chance of winning in traditionally very difficult territory. Interestingly, he has distanced himself from the GOP much as Romney did when he first ran for Senate, but in the present environment Brown’s self-declared independence is both politically smart in Massachusetts and it has not been a cause of conservative activist dismay.

So Tea Party activists in the Northeast are backing a viable candidate in Massachusetts to seize the opportunity of competing for an open Senate seat. This should make clear that the nature of the Tea Party agenda is going to depend on the region where the activists are operating, and it should also emphasize how relatively unimportant social conservative issues are to the Tea Party agenda, whose focus is heavily fiscal and economic. The willingness to acknowledge regional political differences is an encouraging sign that these activists could combine their anti-establishment populists instincts with attention to local political conditions and grievances. That shows the flexibility needed to rebuild a national political coalition.

It also suggests that the specter of vote-splitting between Republican candidates and Tea Party activist-backed candidates is mostly the product of wishful thinking on the part of national Democratic committeemen. Tea Partiers may be quite ready to support reasonably tolerable Republican candidates, so long as those candidates have not crossed certain red lines of offering support to the administration’s agenda. Even though Crist is closer to movement conservatives in some ways on paper than Brown, Crist crossed the red line of actively endorsing the stimulus legislation. It seems that this, more than anything else, has been killing Crist during the primary.

Granted, the vote next week is a special election in a midterm year, so we should expect the insurgent Republican candidate to have a much better chance than he would normally have in a general election there, but even though Brown will probably still lose narrowly he will have done so in a statewide race in a traditionally Democratic state. This makes him extremely different from Hoffman, who failed to win in an historically Republican district that was also one of the most right-leaning House districts in the region.

Andrew cites Abbas Milani on Green Shi’ite theology:

The most significant innovation—found in essays, sermons, books, and even fatwas—is the acceptance of the separation of mosque and state, the idea that religion must be limited to the private domain. Some of these thinkers refuse to afford any privileged position to the clergy’s reading and rendition of Shiism–a radical democratization of the faith. And others, like Akbar Ganji and Mostafa Malekian, have gone so far as to deny the divine origins of Koran, arguing that it is nothing but a historically specific and socially marked interpretation of a divine message by the prophet. The most daring are even opting for a historicized Muhammad, searching for the first time in Shia history for a real, not hagiographic, narrative of his life.

It seems to me that this drives home the political problem with a lot of the intellectual leaders aligned with the Green movement. Note how Milani describes these things. He refers to innovation and describes these moves as radical and daring, and almost seems to brag that these people are denying “the divine origins of Koran.” Even when we understand that this is not a denial of revelation, but rather a denial of the uncreated nature of the Qur’an, this is still a significant break with the religious teachings that most Twelver Iranians would accept. It is as if a group of liberation theologians tied to a movement of largely non-religious students were trying to appeal to a traditional Catholic population by rejecting papal authority and questioning the reality of the Incarnation and the Virgin Birth. This would probably not herald a transformation of Catholicism in that country, but would instead mark the beginning of the end of the movement in question.

Can you imagine anything less likely to appeal to most believers? Is there anything more useful to the regime than identifying leading thinkers of the Green movement with a highly liberalized form of Shi’ism? When a political protest movement has been able to tie its cause together with a people’s traditional religion, or at least when the movement does not appear to attack that religion openly, it tends to win far broader and deeper support. If it appears to challenge established claims of the religion as part of its “reform” project, it necessarily meets with stiffer resistance and wins less support. It opens itself up to charges of impiety and religious error, which the movement may not take seriously, but which a majority of the general population may be only too ready to believe. Instead of appropriating traditional religious language and ideas and turning them against the regime, these Green theological arguments distance the movement from the religion of the majority and they permit the regime to reclaim some of its lost authority.

If it is true that most adherents of the Green movement “are young Iranians with little or no religious motivation,” as Milani says*, the movement is probably far more culturally narrow than it needs to be to succeed. One of the greatest bulwarks against political change is the fear that traditional religion will be corrupted or lost as a result. Sometimes this fear is reasonable, and sometimes it is paranoid, but it is always a problem that political reformers have to contend with in societies that are still fairly religious. So long as the Green movement was appropriating the religious language and ideas of Shi’ism and the revolution, it had some small chance to undermine the government, but the more that it acquires the reputation of trying to transform Shi’ism the more limited it appeal will be. After all, these are not ideas that will unite diverse groups in common cause. They are quite obviously controversial and would likely divide political allies within the movement.

After all, why are clerics going to be inclined to support a movement when the latter’s intellectual spokesmen are making arguments that not only undermine the status of clerics, but also attack basic articles of faith? On this point, Dilip Haro’s recent article is relevant:

On the other hand, what the 1979 movement and the present one have in common is the idea of making political use of the Shi’ite religious days, the Islamic custom of commemorating a dead person on the 40th day of his or her demise, as well as of the martyr complex engrained among Shi’ites. It was Ayatollah Khomeini who pioneered such tactics. He consistently used the 40th day of mourning for the martyrs of the shah’s regime to draw ever bigger, ever more enthusiastic crowds in the streets, and used the holy month of Ramadan to charge the nation with revolutionary fervor.

The attempts of today’s opposition leaders to emulate Khomeini’s example have not succeeded, chiefly because their camp lacks a religious leader of his stature [bold mine-DL].

The “Greening” of Shi’ism Milani reports may be one of the worst developments that has happened in the last six months as far as the political success of the movement is concerned.

* It is worth noting here that if Milani’s statement were made by a skeptic of the Green movement, it would be written off as nothing more than arrogant dismissal.

Ross:

What’s more, I think that all of his warnings will still hold true even if Republicans do “make big gains at all levels,” as Ponnuru puts it, and head into next year with a larger minority in the Senate, control of more statehouses, and maybe even a slim majority in the House (hey, it’s possible).

Ross is discussing the GOP’s difficulty in coming up with a credible agenda for governing, so I realize this is a bit of a throwaway line, but barring something dramatically, catastrophically bad for this administration it is not possible for the GOP to win any kind of majority in the House. Breitbart’s colleagues may be dreaming about another ’66 or ’94, but we are still a very long way from such a result. The Democrats’ Senate prospects are noticeably worse than they were just two months ago, where they could now conceivably drop as many as five seats, but they have not lost nearly as much ground in their House races. Right now, the Republicans can look forward to picking up a maximum of 15 seats, and they are probably more likely to net just 12 more seats.

One problem with the comparisons to 1966 and 1994 is that they usually ignore the differences between 2008 and the other presidential elections that preceded these midterms. The last time we had a midterm election following a presidential vote in which the Democratic candidate won more than 50% of the vote, Democrats lost 15 House seats in 1978. 2010 still seems more like 1978. 2010 is the first midterm election after two strong Democratic cycles that we have had since then. There were dozens of open Democratic seats in 1994, which it much easier for the opposition party to pick them up. There are only eight open competitive seats this year, two which are Republican-held, and according to CQPolitics there are fifteen vulnerable Democratic seats overall. Del Beccaro notices that the GOP was able to make huge gains during a period of economic expansion, and then wrongly concludes that the GOP is in an even better position to make large gains during a period of economic weakness.

The last time we had midterms in such poor economic conditions was 1982, when the Democrats netted 27 House seats after the very severe ’81-’82 recession. While the opposition party stands to benefit from poor economic conditions, the GOP may be in a bad position to take advantage of this. There is the lack of an agenda that Ponnuru and Ross mention, and the GOP’s reputation remains terrible, but no less important is the limited appeal Republicans usually have during recessions. This appeal may be even more limited to the extent that voters still remember and care that the recession and financial crisis began on a Republican President’s watch.

Struan Stevenson has an op-ed in The Washington Times that reminds us that no idea is too crazy or disreputable for some Iran hawks. Stevenson has taken up the odd cause of trying to rehabilitate the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, the left-wing cult-cum-terrorist organization opposed to clerical rule in Iran. Labeling MEK a terrorist group in the ’90s was not primarily a product of extending an olive branch to the newly-elected President Khatami. It was obviously part of an ongoing effort to build the case for regime change against Saddam Hussein, who had been the MEK’s principal sponsor and protector for decades. This had the added effect of satisfying one of Tehran’s complaints. The MEK’s methods and their sponsorship by Hussein didn’t bother Washington very much until overthrowing Hussein became a priority, at which point they officially became a terrorist organization after having been one in reality for a long time.

Likewise, ISCI (formerly SCIRI) and its militia, the Badr brigades, were no longer counted among state-sponsored terrorist organizations once the party became an important part of Iraqi coalition politics, which didn’t mean that they hadn’t really been a terrorist organization all along. They had been labeled as terrorists principally because Tehran backed them against Hussein, and for quite some time Washington was more concerned about Iran than Iraq, so Iran-backed Iraqi groups were deemed dangerous and Iraq-backed Iranian groups were not. Once that began changing in the late ’90s, MEK was caught in the middle, but quickly adapted itself to the new order when Hussein was ousted. Now their old hatred for clerical rule in Tehran is useful once more. Stevenson is correct that these are all political decisions, and he is doing nothing more than advocating yet another politically-motivated change to the MEK’s official status to advance the cause of regime change in Iran. One can call them “patriots,” but they have been no different in their methods than the IRA or Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Stevenson combines disreputable support for a terrorist group with misinterpreting the political scene inside Iran:

It is abundantly clear that Iran will not settle for anything less than a fundamental regime change.

This is far from clear, but Stevenson sets out to try to rehabilitate the MEK by tying it to the political unrest now occurring in Iran. Of course, nothing could be worse for the Green movement than to have their cause connected in any way with a group with a violent past.

P.S. Struan Stevenson is a Scottish Conservative MEP, who “has called for the support and empowerment of the main Iranian opposition movement to the mullahs, the People’s Mohajedin of Iran (PMOI), to help achieve regime change.” By support and empowerment, one assumes he doesn’t mean boosting their self-esteem. Most likely, he means that they should be armed and encouraged to resume their attacks on Iranian installations and officials. This makes Stevenson’s objections that the MEK was disarmed in 2003 ring rather hollow.

The better idea is to form a coalition of the willing outside the U.N. that, among other things, bars companies around the world that do business with Iran from access to Western capital markets. This is likely to get Beijing’s attention in a way that more diplomatic pleading never will. ~The Wall Street Journal

This is straight from Danielle Pletka’s playbook, and it is just as foolish the second time around. There are so many companies from both developed and emerging-market countries that do business with Iran that it is difficult to imagine how Washington could ever get all of the relevant governments to sign on to such a proposal. If you think it is hard to get China to agree to stricter measures against Iran, imagine herding the dozen European and Asian governments in question over the cliff to financial disaster. The absurdity of this idea is fairly easy to demonstrate. For example, Pletka complained in her earlier op-ed:

Consider that in the last two years, Brazil’s Petrobras, China’s Sinopec, Italy’s Eni, Japan’s Mitsui Petrochemical and Norway’s Statoil have all reportedly made deals worth more than $10 million each in Iran’s energy sector

There are many more companies than these that would have to be de-listed from all the major exchanges (not to mention all of the ETFs that may own shares in one or more of these companies), and this process would be legally questionable in itself, but just consider what would be involved here. Washington would need to persuade Italian, Japanese and other European governments to bar companies, including their own, from their stock exchanges. They would be asked to penalize Western companies that have not violated any laws and have been engaged in peaceful commerce with another country with which their governments maintain diplomatic relations. All of these governments are supposed to do this to undermine a government most of them recognize for the sake of an anti-proliferation obsession that relatively few of them take seriously. Furthermore, these governments are expected to do this in a shaky economic climate in which renewed investor confidence has been one of the few bright spots. To comply with this insane proposal, this “coalition of the willing” would have to be willing to create tremendous uncertainty in their markets, outrage a large part of their respective business classes and encourage massive capital flight to those exchanges where these companies would still be traded. The flaw in this proposal is the basic flaw in all sanctions regimes: the states (or in this case the markets) that refuse to participate benefit enormously from the self-imposed isolation of the rest. There will always be states and markets willing to take advantage of others’ withdrawal from commerce and trading. Sanctions have to be universal and binding, or they aren’t going to come close to accomplishing their objectives. All that it would take to defeat this effort would be an exchange in Brazil or India (or China!) that does not go along, and that exchange would become an even larger center of trading very quickly.

What is all the more amazing about this proposal is that it comes from a paper whose editors are normally fanatical free traders opposed to almost any and all restrictions on the movement of capital or labor. Alarmism over Iran’s nuclear program is apparently more important to them than even this otherwise unquestionable article of faith. Once again, the best ideas of the anti-regime Iran hawks are little more than junk.

P.S. On top of all this, the price paid by the barred companies would be relatively small, it would not discourage them from doing business with Iran, and so it would have essentially no effect on the revenues of the Iranian government. China would not be unduly bothered if Western exchanges barred these companies, as it would simply make trading in Hong Kong that much more attractive to Western investors, so China would not be moved to change its position on sanctioning Iran. Even if Washington could assemble its “coalition of the willing,” it would change nothing with respect to Iran.

The Obama administration is increasingly questioning the long-term stability of Tehran’s government and moving to find ways to support Iran’s opposition “Green Movement,” said senior U.S. officials.

The White House is crafting new financial sanctions specifically designed to punish the Iranian entities and individuals most directly involved in the crackdown on Iran’s dissident forces, said the U.S. officials, rather than just those involved in Iran’s nuclear program. ~The Wall Street Journal

This is why correctly assessing the strength and potential of the Green movement matters for U.S. policy. Misreading the situation and concluding that the current Iranian government is weakening lead to adopting one set of policy options rather than another. If they are based on questionable assumptions, and they certainly seem to be, these may prove to be entirely wrong as far as advancing U.S. interests is concerned. One of the unnamed scholars quoted in the article said of officials in the administration, “There’s realization now that this unrest really matters.” What if this “realization” is mistaken and the unrest is not going to have much effect? What if the “realization” is a belated acquiescence to domestic political criticism rather than a careful analysis of what is actually happening?

What seems to be happening is that the administration is gradually abandoning its proper reticence and correct hands-off approach to the Iranian protests on the mistaken assumption that the Green movement is resilient mostly because it has not failed entirely. Having decided to give up on non-interference, the administration nonetheless waited seven months to do something, which means that it has probably opted to involve itself at the moment when the Green movement is already faltering. The first instinct to remain uninvolved and largely silent was the right one. This gave the movement its best chance of flourishing on its own, and it has also allowed us to see the limits of the movement. Now that the movement seems to be losing steam, Washington is coming to provide it with the sort of “help” that is more likely to discredit it and smother it completely.

It seems now that the movement was going to peter out gradually one way or the other, but by involving itself now the administration will make both a policy and a political mistake. It is jeopardizing any remaining chance that engagement with Tehran might yield something, and it is taking what is most likely the losing side in an internal Iranian political fight, and having involved itself the administration will receive a share of the blame for what was already going to happen. The administration will be pilloried from the right for “dithering” and taking too long to act, it will be blamed by human rights groups for not doing enough, and it will lose the sympathy of many advocates of engagement who will object to squandering an opportunity to advance U.S. interests for the sake of yet another misguided, unrealistic democratist effort. Having done its best to resist the siren song of democratist claptrap, the administration will allow an unrelated internal political issue to hijack its entire Iran policy. Instead of laying the groundwork for repairing relations with Tehran, the administration will deepen mistrust of the U.S. and reinforce the position of the most paranoid Iranian hard-liners, which will not serve U.S. interests and which will certainly not be good for other elements in Iran’s government and political life.