Scoblete refers us to a November report from WorldPublicOpinion.org on Iranian public opinion. Obviously, no one poll is definitive, and there are reasons to skeptical of the extent of support the poll shows for the Iranian government, but it seems to confirm the more recent analysis of the Leveretts and Stratfor regarding Iranian public support for the current government. Kull looks specifically at admitted Mousavi supporters:

What we find is that those who openly support Mousavi are different from others. Unlike the others a majority of Mousavi supporters that the press should be completely free from government controls (59%) and that Iran’s relations with the west have worsened under Ahmadinejad (57%).

As compared to others, Mousavi supporters are far more likely to say that the election was not free and fair, that they do not have confidence in the election results and that the Ahmadinejad is not the legitimate president of Iran.

However a modest majority of Mousavi supporters says the opposite. [bold mine-DL]

More important, they express support for the Iranian system. Fifty-three percent say that a body of religious scholars should have the right to overturn laws they believe are contrary to the Koran. Two thirds say they trust the government in Tehran to do the right thing at least some of the time. Majorities say they have some confidence in the Guardian Council (55%) and the President (62%).

Furthermore, even if these people were to have a powerful influence over Iranian foreign policy it would not signal a transformation of US-Iranian relations. Only 35 percent say they trust Obama, and majorities have pernicious assumptions about US goals such as the belief that the US is hostile to Islam (68%). Like the rest of the sample, less than half say they oppose attacks on US troops in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

Perhaps most significant, only 43 percent say they would be ready to give up enriching uranium in exchange for removing sanctions.

The detail that even a majority of admitted Mousavi supporters does not endorse the key claims of the Green movement is remarkable, and so it will probably be dismissed out of hand by pro-Green enthusiasts. If that figure is correct, however, it makes the breadth and depth of the Green movement’s support even more questionable. It would mean that most of the people who are willing to identify themselves as supporters of the leading opposition figure do not accept even the most basic critiques of the election and Ahmadinejad that were at the heart of the movement that claims to represent them. It would also mean that most Western sympathizers and even skeptical Western observers are more likely to accept the core grievances of the Green movement than are most of those who voted for Mousavi. Half of those backing Mousavi may not share the protesters’ complaints about the election even if they do share more broadly in the critiques of the policies of the current government. Assuming that Mousavi won less than half the vote, that would mean that the Green movement is a minority of a minority.

Saying that the U.S. will “bear witness” to abuses and brutality around the world is, in effect, to say that we will send flowers to funerals. Mr. Obama needs to say something considerably more serious. In the case of Iran, for example, he could make it altogether unambiguous that we stand with those risking their lives to confront and, if fortune favors them, overthrow a dangerous, indeed evil regime. ~Eliot Cohen

Cohen’s complaint is pretty old and stale, but it is one that isn’t going away. We already understand that offering unambiguous rhetorical support would change absolutely nothing, except that it would provide Obama some cover from partisan sniping. The Iranian government doesn’t care whether Washington offers “unambiguous” rhetorical support. Confrontational rhetoric does not soften one blow of a truncheon, nor does it free one political prisoner. It might briefly encourage some of the protesters, only to disappoint them when they find that no real assistance is forthcoming. Conceivably it could provoke a harsher crackdown, but even if it doesn’t it isn’t making any concrete contribution to the protesters’ cause.

I have also mentioned before that the government risks offering false hope of direct U.S. aid or intervention if the President begins making these sorts of “unambiguous” statements, and this could lead to an escalation of resistance by the opposition that will simply get them killed in far larger numbers. If Obama’s position is the equivalent of “sending flowers to funerals,” Cohen’s could easily be described as potentially being the cause of many more funerals than there already are. In the end, making statements of support for protesters on the other side of the planet is mostly an exercise in feeling good about ourselves.

The elder Bush was guilty of this sort of caving to “idealism” when he called on Kurds and Shi’ites to rise up against Hussein after the Gulf War. That was a frivolous display of “support” for dissidents, and there was never any intention of backing up the empty words of “support,” because the Bush administration had correctly decided that the U.S. should not commit itself to toppling the Iraqi government in 1991. The call for rebellion against Hussein was an effort to try to have it all in a failed effort to play both hard-headed realist and sympathizer with anti-regime forces. That is the path Cohen would like Obama to take now in Iran. So we see once again that the only specific recommendations Iran hawks can make in this situation would almost certainly make the lot of the Green movement worse.

There is another observation worth making. I have touched on it before, but it seems to me that Cohen’s complaint captures the essence of a lot of criticism of Obama’s handling of foreign policy as a whole better than most. Many of his critics aren’t willing to call for doing anything differently with respect to Iran, so they obsess over what Obama does or does not say about foreign policy matters. Advocates of sanctions don’t really have any reason to complain, as the administration has been moving in their direction for the last six months, so they are reduced to finding fault with Obama’s rhetoric and/or silence. These critics must harp on superficial things, because they aren’t really offering any alternatives to what the administration is doing. Thus we are treated to yet another bit of whining about the alleged “dithering” of the Afghanistan review. Bush took three years to acknowledge, much less correct for, earlier mistakes, but Obama is the one dragging his feet and taking too long to make decisions.

What is most jarring about Cohen’s complaint is how it is just tacked on at the end of an article in which he has used the rest of his argument to portray Obama as incredibly self-confident, verbose and supremely self-absorbed (“international displays of presidential ego”). Cohen would have us believe that all of these things are flaws, but also that Obama’s “muteness” on democracy and human rights is another flaw. In other words, Cohen would very much like Obama to give endless speeches bristling with arrogance and self-importance, provided that he gives them on the right subjects. Cohen and critics like him would like nothing more than to have Obama play the caricature of himself they have laid out, but they would like to have this Obama caricature repeating their talking points. Having berated him for years for being insubstantial and being incapable of refraining from comment, they are now very eager to have him give boilerplate speeches on a matter he cannot influence.

Moreover, is it a “realist super-frisson” when the United States does business with and/or engages China, Egypt, Russia, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Georgia and so on?

And who exactly are these neoconservatives doubting the spirit and efficacy of the Green Movement? Name names, please. As far as I can tell, most if not all of the leading neoconservative intellectuals and opinion makers have at the very least listed the unrest in Iran as one of several reasons for not engaging the Iranian regime. Their rhetoric sounds very similar to Andrew’s, only we know what the former’s intentions are: Regime change, be it through the support of revolution or outright attack. ~Kevin Sullivan

There were a few neoconservatives who initially thought that Ahmadinejad’s victory could have been legitimate, or at least that a majority probably supported him and his allies. In any case, a very few preferred to keep Ahmadinejad where he was, or they wanted to deny that the election had much significance. Neoconservatives took this line in part because they wanted to emphasize the irredeemably bad nature of the regime as a way of pushing maximally confrontational policies against it. In this view, a Mousavi win would have reduced the international pressure on Iran and made it harder to demonize the government. One of them was Daniel Pipes. Since isolating and demonizing Iran’s government are what these neoconservatives want to see, it would have been just as well for Ahmadinejad to prevail. What is so strange about the current situation is that Western pro-Green enthusiasts who profess contempt for Pipes et al. are nonetheless unintentionally aiding those forces here at home that want to shut down any policy options other than sanctions and bombing.

As far as I can remember, most other neoconservatives have exploited the Iranian protest movement as a way to whack Obama like a pinata for being insufficiently zealous on behalf of Iranian dissidents. This has fit into the narrative they would like to craft about Obama, which is that he does not do not enough on behalf of political dissidents. This is something that they apparently regard as completely unacceptable. Unless one assumes that they are completely opportunistic and cynical, which I admit is sometimes hard not to do, it is difficult to class most neoconservatives as doubters of the strength and potential of the Green movement. Most neoconservatives have always been very eager to endorse the democratic and “pro-Western” credentials of dissident figures against rival and authoritarian governments, whether these claims were really true or not. This has often led to the unthinking and occasionally very dangerous American embrace of another country’s exiles, opposition oligarchs or extreme nationalist “reformers,” mostly because the dissidents in question happen to hate some of the same things that neoconservatives seem to hate (e.g., Saddam Hussein, Russia, etc.), but most neoconservatives are only too happy to cheer on and exaggerate the strength of dissident movements in other countries.

Kevin Sullivan argues that “if Iran gets the bomb I believe it will enable the regime to crackdown on dissidents with never before seen impunity.” This is possible, but I’m not sure that the two are all that closely linked. At present, Iran can already crack down on dissidents however and whenever it likes with impunity, and I don’t know that acquiring a nuclear weapon would add much to its willingness or ability to engage in such crackdowns. Outside intervention on behalf of Iranian dissidents will not be forthcoming anyway, so even the nuclear deterrent a bomb would provide would not make much difference. It could be that the acquisition of a bomb, especially if it came in the face of considerable international opposition, would give the regime new life and make it harder to portray the current government as a failure or as an obstacle to achieving national goals. This could reduce the need for violent crackdowns inasmuch as it could make dissent less attractive. If Iran’s acquisition of a bomb triggered an attack from other states, this would certainly be a disaster for dissidents, because it would make it increasingly difficult to speak against the government without appearing to be aligned with the attacking states. Nuclear arms would give the Iranian “deep” state much more security, and probably would mean that the military and IRGC’s already extensive role in the politics and economy of Iran would grow larger, but as a result this might permit some new space for a return to the quasi-democratic political theater of the past.

However, it seems to me that the main thing that should concern the U.S. is whether Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons can be managed and contained. Unless it is very clear that this is not possible, our policy debate should be focused on how best to manage and contain something we are not going to be able to stop from happening.

During my experience actually negotiating with senior counterparts from the Islamic Republic, I saw first-hand how my Iranian interlocutors were able to negotiate productively, deliver on specific commitments, and make concessions and calculate trade-offs across a range of issues. In this regard, recent statements by Kenneth Timmerman on C-Span’s Washington Journal that my husband, Flynt Leverett, and I have been spreading “lies” about Iran’s substantial cooperation with post-9/11 American efforts in Afghanistan are beneath contempt. Mr. Timmerman was not in government, and does not know what he is talking about. I was one of very few U.S. officials authorized to deal directly with Iranian officials regarding Afghanistan–Timmerman’s neoconservative friends at the Pentagon were deliberately kept out of those discussions–and I saw what the Iranians did to help us in Afghanistan. ~Hillary Mann Leverett

Leverett is responding here to Jeffrey Goldberg’s supposedly damning revelations that she has changed her views on the value of engaging Iran. There are a few things to say here. One is that Goldberg is resorting to the same kind of attack that was directing against Trita Parsi and NIAC late last year, and he is employing the same kind of tactic that proponents of invading Iraq used against skeptics in 2002-03, which was to denounce war opponents as “pro-Saddam” or “apologists for despotism.” What also occurs to me is that Mrs. Leverett’s own career provides an interesting example of how direct contact and engagement with actual Iranian officials regarding matters of common interest caused her to change her mind about the prospects for diplomatic engagement. Sometimes I think there is so much resistance to significant, sustained engagement with Iran because it would become much harder to support the idea that engagement is a dead end once enough American officials discovered that their counterparts were capable of negotiating and brokering deals that serve the interests of both governments.

Timmerman’s insult is worse than Leverett allows here, because it is hardly a state secret that Iran was helpful in aiding our fight against the Taliban in 2001-02. However, it is one of those inconvenient facts that does get lost over the years. I distinctly remember The Economist reporting that Iran had agreed to help American pilots in their territory in the event that they crashed there, which the magazine report mentioned as one of several examples of Iranian cooperation during the initial stage of the Afghan war. I also recall The Economist article remarking on how this foundation of cooperation had fallen apart once Mr. Bush denounced Iran as part of the “axis of evil.”

This is the oft-repeated story about a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization. ~David Brooks

This is how I described Avatar a few weeks ago, and Brooks is right about this much. Brooks calls the story an offensive one, and I suppose it is, but what is more interesting is why the fable he describes keeps being re-told and why fairly large audiences seem to respond to it. The Western experience of at least the last sixty years has been shaped by a series of wars, some of which have been chosen and started by Westerners, in which our official, professed desire to help, assist and liberate other nations has usually sharply clashed with the effects our interventions have had on other nations’ lands and their perceptions of us. The fable appeals to the same meddlesome desire to “help” other nations that is used to justify military interventions, but it accepts that interventions typically prove to be disasters for the “beneficiaries,” at least when they are directed by the wrong sorts of people. Avatar and other stories like it tell the disenchanted would-be do-gooders that there is a way to save the world or help save another group of people without engaging in the same sort of overt domination. It permits meddling with a good conscience.

Brooks is right when he says the story teaches that, “Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.” What he fails to do is connect this to the urges of our own liberal imperialists and humanitarian interventionists, who are constantly warning against leaving other nations to their own devices and who are frequently complaining about our boundless benevolence that is repaid with contempt or indifference. He might consult his colleague Thomas Friedman on this point, since Friedman seems to think that most Muslims worldwide are “holding our coats” while we do all the heavy lifting on their behalf and that Afghanistan can be likened to a “special needs baby” that we as a country have just adopted. Muslims do tend to be reduced to supporting actors in Friedman’s own journey of self-importance. This is not just Friedman’s problem. It is the condescension and disdain for other nations shared by developmentalists, neo-imperialists, humanitarian interventionists and garden-variety hawks. It is the idea that other nations cannot possibly solve their own internal problems and probably shouldn’t be allowed to try. This troubles these different groups for different reasons, but all of them eventually come to the same conclusion that whatever problem they identify with other nations merits some measure of direct intervention by major powers. Whether the issue is poor governance, slow economic development, human rights abuses, weak state institutions or an inability to combat non-state actors in their territories, other states are not really permitted the same degree of sovereignty industrialized and Westernized states take for granted. This is built into the assumptions of a large part of U.S. policy overseas, as well as informing the activities of the IMF and World Bank.

After all, it has been one of the frequent complaints of mainstream pundits that Muslims worldwide are insufficiently grateful for all that we have done for them. Friedman was one of the most recent to make this claim again, but he is far from being alone. At the start of the decade, these pundits made a great deal out of Western aid for Balkan Muslims against the Serbs, as if to stress how ready we were to go against a nation historically and culturally tied to us. Even though Serbia had been on the Allied side in both world wars, and therefore had been as much on “our” side as any nation in Europe, it became the enemy in the eyes of most right-thinking Westerners, and it was the Serbs’ status as European Christians that made them ideal as a target of intervention. In other words, a version of the fable Brooks described became official policy. The truly offensive thing about all this is that Brooks will safely deride the fable and its assumptions when it appears in a meaningless blockbuster film, but he isn’t going to challenge or reject those assumptions when they inform real and destructive policies around the world.

Walter Russell Mead has an interesting response to someof the criticisms of his recent Foreign Policy article. He explains his view of the Jeffersonians:

The four categories in Special Providence are intended to be suggestive and evocative and the Jeffersonian category is probably the most complex and even elusive of the four. Special Providence is a book of historical reflection, not an act of political science category-building. I’m not a political scientist and while some political scientists have done some interesting work by adapting these categories in various ways, that’s not a game I’m qualified to play.

I don’t try to work this out systematically in Special Providence, but the book discusses three types or maybe flavors of Jeffersonian. (All of the categories have subgroups, by the way: there have been free-trade and protectionist Hamiltonians, liberal and neo-conservative Wilsonians, traditional and crabgrass Jacksonians. Maybe someday I’ll write a sequel.) There are the libertarian Jeffersonians who tend to be skeptical of America’s contemporary global engagements and objectives on classic small-government grounds. The Cato Institute does work that often reflects this perspective. The conservative opposition to George W. Bush’s foreign policy and some of the ‘paleo-conservatives’ who have attacked the aggressively globalist neoconservatives also often fit this description.

There are also left-Jeffersonians. Lori Wallach, Ralph Nader, Naomi Klein, William Greider and other critics of the globalist establishment from a left-populist perspective base their opposition to central bank cabals and the World Trade Organization on the very Jeffersonian view that powerful elites used these international organizations and agreements to impose a corporation-friendly elite project on the American people at large.

Left and right Jeffersonians argue bitterly among themselves about who most deserves the mantle of Thomas Jefferson; that’s not a question I feel compelled to adjudicate. Thomas Jefferson had a complex mind and his views frequently changed as the situation changed around him through more than half a century of public life. But I think both the left and the right Jeffersonians can legitimately claim a vital connection with at least some of the major themes to which he kept returning.

The third type of Jeffersonian that appears in Special Providence is, I think, the most interesting kind. These ‘high’ Jeffersonians think that many of the left and right Jeffersonians are knee-jerk Jeffersonians. That is, their instincts are good but their policy approach is unsound. The high Jeffersonians aren’t particularly happy that the United States has vital strategic interests that connect it to the rest of the world in complex and sometimes unsatisfactory and dangerous ways. Unlike Hamiltonians and Wilsonians, who tend to see foreign policy as a field of dreams and who look forward eagerly to new projects for economic, legal and democratic order building, high Jeffersonians have serious qualms about the costs and the consequences of these projects. High Jeffersonians seek to create strategic architectures that address the nation’s broad and often global interests at the lowest possible risk and cost.

One example I cite in the book is George Kennan, who developed the concept of containment in the hopes that it would allow the U.S. to pursue its legitimate and necessary interest in defending itself and key global power centers from the Soviet Union after World War II. I also argue that John Quincy Adams (the real author of the Monroe Doctrine) was a high Jeffersonian who figured out a way for the U.S. to advance its core interests by making British world power work for us rather than against us. Special Providence also points to Walter Lippmann and his concept of ’solvency’ in foreign policy as an example of Jeffersonian thinking. Both in the book and in the article I point to Henry Kissinger as another figure who sought to build a strategic architecture that recognized both the sharp limits of American power and the global nature of American interests, though the Kissinger case is a complicated one. In Special Providence I also say that while all the schools have legitimate points to make and play valuable roles in the American political process, this high Jeffersonian approach is my own personal favorite.

I understand the distinction Mead is making. Being something of a knee-jerk right-Jeffersonian, I can’t say that I see the individuals he mentions here as holding a Jeffersonian view of foreign policy. If I had to make an exception, it would have to be Adams, but he served under Monroe in one of the Democratic-Republican administrations that succeeded Jefferson and he served in government at a time when no one, regardless of political background, was advocating the sort of entanglements that Jefferson originally opposed. What I do see in his examples of “high Jeffersonians” is a group of men who had either good instincts or at least a few good ideas, and many of the 20th century figures share the fate of have been effectively disowned at one time or another by internationalists of all stripes (e.g., Kissinger because of detente, Kennan because of his later anti-anticommunism and opposition to Vietnam). This makes them more interesting internationalists, but it seems to me that Mead counts them as “high Jeffersonians” because he happens to find them or some of their ideas more attractive than the alternatives available at the time. It now seems to me that he included Obama among them because he finds at least some elements of Obama’s foreign policy more attractive than the alternatives on offer.

So I was mistaken in my earlier post in insisting that Mead was portraying Obama as a Jeffersonian as a way of trying to undermine him. What threw me off, and what I think must have puzzled Klein and Yglesias, was the invocation of Carter. Mild Carter revisionism has some thoughtful proponents, but Mead wasn’t saying that it is a good thing that Obama might be remembered as another Carter because Carter’s record isn’t understood properly. Mentioning Carter in connection with Obama’s foreign policy is bound to provoke hostile responses. Mead has guessed as much in another post. As it happens, I agree with Mead that Obama’s foreign policy has much in common with the “the Nixon-Kissinger policy of retrenchment.”

As I wrote last month:

Every liberal has to be portrayed as a McGovernite (and a caricature of a McGovernite at that!) to cover up the reality that liberal internationalists have largely occupied the policy and political ground on which Nixon and Republican realists once stood.

So there is merit in comparing the policies of Nixon-Kissinger and Obama. What still puzzles me is why this similarity proves Obama’s inner Jeffersonianism. If I set aside the label for a moment, I tend to agree that Obama has been working in a very few areas ” to reduce America’s conflicts with other states to the necessary minimum in order to avoid antagonizing people and involving the US in more crises and disputes than absolutely necessary,” but where Mead sees this as a way of limiting risk to the U.S. I still see it as the perpetuation of an unnecessary and unnecessarily risky and aggressive posture around the world. Regardless, that description doesn’t fully capture what Obama is doing. If he were intent on reducing conflicts with other states to the “necessary minimum,” I don’t understand why he would make climate change agreements a priority when dealing with India and China, I don’t know why he would insist on thwarting Iran’s nuclear program, and I don’t see why he would continue to support NATO expansion even deeper into the former USSR. Someone who was inclined to avoid antagonizing other nations and keeping us out of disputes that are not our concern would never have raised the idea of mediating the dispute in Kashmir. Granted, the administration backed off quickly when India rejected this idea, but it should never have occurred to him to say this. Instead of taking advantage of the DPJ victory in Japan and finding some way to reduce our military presence in Okinawa voluntarily, the basing dispute has become a source of significant tension between the two governments. Indeed, other than scrapping the missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, it is hard to find examples of Obama actually trying to eliminate unnecessary conflicts with other states. The phrase “necessary minimum” must mean something very different to Mead than it does to me.

Like Klein, I see much more of a fusion of Wilsonian and Hamiltonian ideas in Obama’s policies, which I normally take to be very different if not diametrically opposed to the Jeffersonian persuasion. One could make an argument that Obama may be a less aggressive Hamiltonian or a less “idealistic” Wilsonian, and this would account for many of the apparent tensions and contradictions Mead has identified.

Andrew quotes a reader who thinks he has come up with a very clever argument against the Leveretts’ op-ed:

They [the Leveretts] suggest that there can’t be another revolution in Iran unless the opposition knows exactly what it wants, it has a visible leader in control, and it has a “process” for replacing the current government. How many modern revolutions have ever satisfied those conditions, beginning with the French Revolution?

Is this a serious question, or was the reader just trying to be contrary? Most revolutions do have specific goals and demands, most of the successful ones do have organized leadership that can mobilize at least a dedicated cadre of followers, and most have some idea what means they will need to exact the concessions they desire and have some idea of how to acquire these means. When revolutions fail, as they did across Europe in 1848, they failed because they were poorly organized, because they had an agenda that was either insufficiently developed or insufficiently attractive to a broad cross-section of society, and because they had no means by which they were going to take power. Most of the successful ones tapped into dissatisfaction with the current leadership and then effectively supplanted that leadership and established their own authority. Meeting these conditions is usually necessary for a revolution to succeed, and even then international conditions must be favorable. Liberal revolutionaries in Austria and Hungary might have had a chance in 1848, but Russian intervention put a stop to that. Even our own “revolution” could very well have been smothered in its crib had the colonies not obtained vital allied military support. When I read Soroush invoking Gandhi and preaching non-violence, I simply marvel. Aung San Suu Kyi has been preaching the same admirable and ineffective message in Burma for nearly twenty years. This sort of movement will undoubtedly win a lot of sympathy from Westerners, but it is unlikely to do much to weaken, much less break, the regime’s hold on power.

There is also something to be said for paying attention mainly to revolutions in Iranian history. If political change in Iran from the constitutional revolution to 1979 has happened in certain ways, that may tell us something about the specific political constitution of Iran that will give us a better idea of what chance the Green movement might have. This is probably why the Leveretts spent as much time as they did addressing the claims that 1978-79 precedents supported a more optimistic assessment of the movement’s chances. It is interesting as a matter of comparative politics and history to think about similarities between different revolutions, but it is normally local conditions and the details of a country’s political history that determine how political change occurs.

P.S. Andrew seems to think that mainstream media outlets are just craving dissenting voices calling for more extensive engagement with Iran. I have no idea why he thinks this. Evidently, he believes this because there is occasionally one co-written op-ed by the Leveretts in a major news outlet every couple of months. Meanwhile, one will look all day long in vain for similar arguments coming from the NYT’s own columnists, to say nothing of The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post. Even Roger Cohen has turned into little more than a pro-Green cheerleader. Nothing that has happened in the last six months have really disproved the core claim the Leveretts made last summer. They argued then that the Green movement did not command the support of a majority of Iranians, and there is still not much evidence that it does. Mousavi’s support was never as low as the official government tally made it out to be, but it does not follow that it must be vastly greater simply because the government chose to grossly exaggerate Ahmadinejad’s vote tally.

As expected, Andrew didn’t like the Leveretts’ op-ed, which he calls part of “their campaign to diminish the significance of the Iranian uprising.” They might say that they are interested in correctly assessing the significance of any uprising in order to make their policy recommendations as realistic as possible. After all, if Western policymakers start banking on domestic political unrest to undermine the Iranian government in a major way, they will pursue policies that would be very different than if they assume that the current Iranian government is not changing and not going anywhere. Andrew cites Scott Lucas, who complains that the Leveretts’ purpose is to “prop up the “default” option that the regime (whose political, religious, economic, and ideological position is not examined beyond that claim of a million protesters on its behalf on 30 December) must not only be accepted but embraced in talks.”

Obviously, if one believes that negotiating with Iran is a necessary and important next step in repairing relations between our governments, this is not a “default” option. It is the only realistic option there is. The hostage crisis ended 29 years ago, and the barracks bombing in Lebanon was over 26 years ago, and by this time after our war with Vietnam we had already normalized relations and had begun engaging in commerce with them. Considering how much more reason many Americans had to dislike and distrust Vietnam’s communist government, it is extraordinary that it has taken us less time to bury the hatchet with Hanoi than it has with Tehran.

If the Leveretts are pushing for negotiations, many of the pro-Green enthusiasts in the West are exploiting the protests to push for more confrontational, hard-line policies against Iran. Engagement was already distasteful enough in some quarters, and after the crackdown last summer it now seems even worse. This gives pro-sanctions and pro-bombing hawks all that they need to push for more of the same failed, counterproductive policies they have advocated for years. By holding out the illusion of substantial political change in Iran, hawks can push for delaying meaningful negotiations and can gain support for destructive sanctions measures. This has led to the increasing public support for military action against Iran that I have mentioned before. Were such military action to take place, it would be a political disaster for any opposition forces, who would be put in the impossible position of either appearing to betray their country by welcoming the attack or denouncing the attacks and rallying around the government they despise. As soon as there were any civilian casualties, the absurd claim that military strikes were aimed only at the regime and not at the people would be rendered void. Many of the people claiming to be friends of Iranian opposition forces are empowering the very forces here in the U.S. that would bring ruin to the Iranian opposition. As the old proverb says, “The yes-man is your enemy, but your friend will argue with you.”

Of course it might have some bearing on the real power of the Iranian government vis-a-vis the opposition that it can conjure up a crowd of a million “supporters” to the opposition’s tens of thousands. Andrew is right that the opposition protesters face far more risks and dangers, which is why the immediate post-election protests seemed so impressive and why the latest cycle of protests points to the steady weakening of the opposition. If most Iranians are fence-sitters looking for a sign of which side is more likely to win, amassing such a crowd will work to discourage most from taking the very serious risks that now go along with protesting against the government. These demonstrations don’t mean that the regime necessarily has masses of enthusiastic supporters (though we should be wary of dismissing the reality that a significant minority of Iranians tied into the establishment are genuine loyalists who have vested interests in the current government’s survival), but it means that they retain sufficient control and coercive powers that they can stage huge rallies and effectively prevent the opposition from gathering in similarly large numbers. It is a demonstration that the government commands public space and that it is not losing control. The government’s rallies may be fake and the opposition protests may be heartfelt and courageous, but so long as an authoritarian state can limit and divide its opposition and retains the loyalty of its security forces none of that matters.

Update: The Leveretts have a follow-up post at their blog.

Beyond expressing inchoate discontent, what does the current “opposition” want? It is no longer championing Mr. Mousavi’s presidential candidacy; Mr. Mousavi himself has now redefined his agenda as “national reconciliation.” Some protesters seem to want expanded personal freedoms and interaction with the rest of the world, but have no comprehensive agenda. Others — who have received considerable Western press coverage — have taken to calling for the Islamic Republic’s replacement with an (ostensibly secular) “Iranian Republic.” But University of Maryland polling after the election and popular reaction to the Ashura protests suggest that most Iranians are unmoved, if not repelled, by calls for the Islamic Republic’s abolition. ~Flynt & Hillary Mann Leverett

What the Leveretts are describing is the tendency of Western observers to seek out those aspects of foreign protests most recognizable and amenable to their sensibilities, to vastly exaggerate the significance of those aspects and then to engage in a lot of sentimental well-wishing on behalf of the protesters. This brings us back to the original problem of much of the Western boosterism for the Green movement: many Westerners assume that the movement is broadly representative when it simply doesn’t seem to be. Pro-Green enthusiasts imagine a regime in meltdown when the regime seems to be regaining whatever ground it lost during the summer and early autumn. Stratfor has also offered some words of caution against making too much of the latest cycle of protests. Stratfor (via Kevin Sullivan) compares the Iranian protests with the 1991 Belgrade protests against Milosevic, but perhaps an even better comparison with the rudderless Green forces is the “Saffron revolution” in Burma over two years ago that was crushed fairly quickly. Even when we acknowledge that most of the “color” revolutions were exercises in swapping out one set of oligarchs or clans for another, the relative success of the so-called revolutions depended on the unwillingness and inability of the regime leaders to hang on to power at all costs. Shevardnadze, Yanukovych and Akayev all stepped aside, usually at the insistence of Moscow or Washington or both. The major powers that could conceivably pressure Tehran to make concessions or try to force individual leaders out have no interest in doing so. Practically every state of any consequence in Asia accepts Ahmadinejad’s re-election, and most of them are not interested in encouraging domestic unrest and political transformation.

As the Stratfor analysis notes, Milosevic was cut off from any meaningful international support by 2000, and in each of these other “revolutions” the incumbent figure could not rely on an extensive state structure to shield him from his opponents. It was the relative weakness of the state in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan that made taking it over much easier, and this also meant that the takeover involved far less significant change than outside boosters of the revolutions believed. The Iranian state is much stronger, and unlike the governments in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan the Iranian government has given up any pretense of respecting norms governing even quasi-democratic elections. As economically troubled as Iran is, it is a wealthier and more powerful state than any of those three, and it is therefore more resistant to outside pressures. It is not as economically dependent on any one major power, which means that it can more easily ignore the displeasure of any one of its trading partners and can try to play them against one another. In the end, the same dependence on Russia that made the success of the so-called Rose and Orange revolutions possible when the Kremlin ultimately abandoned its protege is the very dependence that has crippled both countries and steadily undermined the “revolutionary” governments.

The other “color” revolutions were primarily aimed at detaching Russian and Syrian satellites from their patrons and installing more “pro-Western” (i.e., anti-Russian or anti-Syrian) leaders, and they succeeded to the extent that there was a genuine coalition organized around anti-Russian or anti-Syrian sentiment. Kyrgyzstan does not really fit this description because the clash in Kyrgyzstan was between regions and clans and had almost nothing to do with the contest between Moscow and Washington for influence, as Bakiyev’s drift back into Moscow’s orbit has made clear. Iran does not fit any of these models. Some Iranian protesters may have taken up chanting “death to Russia, death to China!”, but this does not resonate with many people. They are not tapping into nationalist or anti-colonial sentiment, and as the Leveretts suggest the attempts to tap into religious sentiment may not be working and may instead appear to be cynical exploitation of religious celebrations instead of a close identification of the protests with more broadly accepted religious values.

Iran is much more like Burma in that it is a client state that also has significant natural resources that its neighbors and trading partners want very much. Just as natural gas resources made India tacitly accept the Burmese crackdown, Chinese and Indian interests in Iranian oil and gas and Russian interest in arms and technology transfers will ensure steady outside support for the status quo in Iran. The major powers that are in a position to influence Iran are those that do extensive business with them, and for thirty years Washington has made sure that America would never be one of them. Naturally, having completely failed to affect Tehran with sanctions over three decades, the best idea anti-regime Americans have is to impose additional sanctions.