It was only a matter of time before Michael Gerson would begin weeping green tears and telling us how immoral Obama’s restrained response was. As one might expect, we are supposed to believe that it is a problem that Obama’s foreign policy is similar to that of the elder Bush, who was, for all of his many flaws and mistakes, probably one of the most successful foreign policy Presidents of the last half-century. We cannot really blame Gerson for persisting in his obsessions, since he has to find some way to make the record of the President he served and enabled for years look like something other than the catastrophic failure that it was. In this case, mocking Bush’s more accomplished father is what he feels compelled to do.

It has become conventional to deride the elder Bush’s 1991 speech in Kiev warning against Ukrainian independence, but looking back over the last twenty years, especially in the Balkans and the Caucasus, there is something to be said for having warned against “suicidal nationalism.” Given the ethnic heterogeneity in Ukraine and the fiercely anti-Russian nature of Ukrainian nationalism, the region has been fortunate that the potential for continued political fracturing that the principle of self-determination possesses has not been realized there. The pity is that Bush did not do more to warn the peoples of Yugoslavia against the same thing a year earlier.

Self-determination is one of those things that sounds lovely in principle, but which has caused a great deal of human suffering around the world. It is, of course, the corrupt idol of Wilsonian idealism, before which Gerson prostrates himself daily. It was this principle that shattered the Austrian empire and broke it up into easily digestible bits, creating a power vacuum in central Europe that major powers were only too happy to fill soon thereafter, and it was this principle that plunged the Balkans into a decade of hell. Not that it gets much attention, but it was also the principle that sparked the Eritrean-Ethiopian war that has cost both countries thousands upon thousands of lives and wrecked their political cultures ever since. When great multinational states break up, it has rarely been a peaceful process. If Bush erred in 1991, which is very debatable, he wisely erred on the side of caution to prevent conflagrations from consuming the ex-Soviet republics. At the time Bush was speaking, Azeris and Armenians were still fighting over Karabakh, and Yugoslavia was beginning to come apart. It would have been dangerous and, of course, harmful to relations with Moscow to cheer on separatist movements.

Having said all that, the relevant comparison with Iran from the administration of the first Bush is not the speech in Kiev, but Bush’s utterly irresponsible call for Iraqi Shi’ites to rise up against Hussein when he had no intention of aiding them. Not getting more deeply involved in Iraq was wise, but urging people to risk their lives when you have no intention of providing anything but empty rhetorical support is a gross error. Let’s be clear: Gerson wants Obama to incite the protesters and urge them to seek “freedom,” which in practice will mean provoking them to greater and greater confrontation with the government and ensuring that the crackdown against them will be even more bloody and cruel than it has been so far. Their blood will flow so that Gerson’s bleeding heart can rest easy.

Fisk has reported on the circulation of fliers purporting to be copies of a confidential Interior Ministry letter showing the “actual results” of the election, which I suppose we are expected to believe they sent to Khamenei as a souvenir, and is appropriately as skeptical of the ludicrous Mousavi and Karroubi numbers (totaling approximately 80% of the vote to Ahmadinejad’s 14%) as everyone has reasonably been skeptical of Ahmadinejad’s alleged 24 million votes. Of course, why the ministry would have the “actual results” on Monday, when the letter was dated, after the election had already been declared for the incumbent is one of those things the protesters would rather not think about. The 13m+ figure for Karroubi seems almost designed as a retort to the suspiciously low undercount in the official results (400,000), as if to say, “We can make up ridiculously favorable numbers just like you!” Via Clive Davis, Hooman Majd has a helpful, balanced assessment of what the real numbers for Ahmadinejad were likely to have been:

How could the officials, after all, have altered the hand-written ballots of more than 40m citizens or counted enough ballots in such a short time? It has dawned on many Iranians there might never have been any intention to count the ballots. The Big Lie? …There is little question that Mr Ahmadinejad enjoys the support of perhaps as many as 15m Iranians, but the results adding another 10m votes to his hardcore base beggar belief. Shock and awe? You bet.

It does seem clear that the votes, or at least a great many of the votes, were never counted, and it fits with what we know that the final numbers were simply made up. Note that this in itself does not prove that the election was stolen as such (i.e., it doesn’t prove that Mousavi actually won a majority or even a plurality), but merely that the authorities had no intention of letting anyone but Ahmadinejad win. The end result may be the same, but that seems an important distinction to make. Rather than drag out the process into a second round, they wanted to be done with it as soon as possible, so why bother counting anything? That seems to make the most sense of what we have seen, but this, too, is really just speculation.

That said, the flier that Mousavi backers are now waving about as the “proof” appears to be little more than counter-propaganda. If it is incredible and absurd that Ahmadinejad won two-thirds of the vote nationwide, as so many people insist it is, it is no less absurd to think that two-thirds of the people who voted for him in 2005 abandoned him. If Majd’s estimate is even close to being right, the claim that Ahmadinejad won fewer than 6m votes is fairly laughable. Moreover, the idea that the government would go to the trouble of counting all votes after it had already decided to give the election to Ahmadinejad ahead of time is bizarre, and it is even more bizarre to think that the ministry responsible for making up the official numbers would make any kind of official record of the “actual results.” It remains probable that Ahmadinejad still won a plurality, but that no one at the highest levels wanted to take a chance that he wouldn’t, and no one wanted to run the risk of the second round going against their candidate.

Earlier this month, I said that the Congressional Republican leadership was lacking in credibility on fiscal and economic policy, because so many of them were tainted by very public support for the former administration’s financial sector bailout, and on account of this and their subsequent political blunders I said they should be replaced. My point at the time, which quite a few seemed to miss, is that this leadership will not be able to challenge Obama’s domestic agenda effectively, because they have neither the ideas nor the judgment to do so. Now we are seeing the utterly inadequate and foolish response of several members of the current House GOP leadership to one of the first major events overseas since Obama was inaugurated, the Iranian election, which reminds us that the GOP has destroyed its credibility on foreign policy and has been reduced to irresponsible sniping as demonstrated by Eric Cantor and Mike Pence, the minority whip and conference chairman respectively. It is also a reminder that Obama has occupied the political and policy center with respect to foreign policy, and a majority of Americans (57% or 54%) apparently approves of his handling of foreign policy so far. Meanwhile, the reputation of the GOP continues to sink ever lower (25% fav/45% unfav).

One reason why Cantor and Pence have been demanding that the President take a stronger public line in support of the protesters in Iran is that supporting Mousavi’s voters openly is the emotionally satisfying, easy, almost mindless thing to do, so it is very appealing for opposition figures who have no ideas. But there is more to it than that. All of this comes back to the problem of Republican denial about why they lost power. They are supremely confident about their views on national security and foreign policy, and they cannot conceive that a majority of the country would reject them because of the policies they advocated and enacted. Worse still, they remain wedded to the hectoring, moralistic and aggressive approach of the last administration, in which sanctions and condemnation are the only “soft” tools they understand. They are so wedded to this approach that that they think this is not only the best kind of foreign policy, but that anything other than this is fecklessness and surrender. To a disturbingly great extent, replacing the current leadership may not have much of an effect on shoddy foreign policy thinking on the right, because the rot is so deep and widespread, but it is particularly important that Republicans in positions of responsibility at least attempt to play the role of credible, informed opposition, which may sometimes mean acknowledging that the President has handled an issue correctly. It will also mean building up the credibility and knowledge to challenge and resist the President if he embarks on misguided or irresponsible courses in the years to come. Cantor and Pence have shown this week that they do not have either one.

But this is what “realism” is all about. It is what sent Brent Scowcroft to raise a champagne toast to China’s leaders in the wake of Tiananmen Square. It is what convinced Gerald Ford not to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn at the height of detente. Republicans have traditionally been better at it than Democrats — though they have rarely been rewarded by the American people at the ballot box, as Ford and George H.W. Bush can attest. ~Robert Kagan

Andrew refers to this op-ed as “shameless domestic politicking,” but that is not exactly what this is. This is another volley in the endless neoconservative-cum-idealist war against the reputation of foreign policy realism. Kagan is not interested in scoring partisan points, nor is he even particularly concerned about categories of liberal and conservative here, as the targeting of Scowcroft, Bush I and Ford make clear, but he very much wants to use Obama’s correct response of restraint to bash realism. It is supposed to be some sort of damning indictment that the first Bush administration didn’t destroy the U.S.-China relationship in a fit of moral pique. East Asia and America are both likely better off because realism prevailed twenty years ago. It is now supposed to be a killing remark to say, “But once Mousavi lost, however fairly or unfairly, Obama objectively had no use for him or his followers.” In other words, he has so far acted the part of something very much like a responsible statesman. He has not acted like a glory-hounding demagogue who would rather appease his domestic audience with tough-sounding rhetoric that works to harm American interests throughout the region.

Obama’s response to the Iranian election reminds me of his initial remarks in response to the war in Georgia, which Kagan et al. likewise deemed insufficient and weak, but which were far more measured and intelligent than those made by McCain and the former administration. He subsequently fell in line with conventional anti-Russian rhetoric, but at the time he was still a candidate and could afford to be more careless with his statements. Now that he is President, he seems to be acting the part when it matters. While he infuriatingly continues to support Georgian accession to NATO at some point in the future, he seems less willing to destroy what remains of our relationship with Russia in the process. Obama does seem to understand that foreign policy is a matter of state interests, and that Iran and America have some shared interests regardless of the shape of the government in Tehran. His foremost responsibility is to secure American interests, and reasonably enough this involves rapprochement with Iran, so you’d better believe that he is not going to put the cause of Mousavi ahead of that of the United States. If Nixon could go to China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, which was a hundred times more brutal and appalling than anything we have seen in Iran over the last few days, Obama can and should persist in engaging Iran.

Kagan’s reference to the ballot box at the end is almost a throwaway line, and Kagan is utterly wrong about the political fallout of Ford’s pursuit of detente and Bush’s handling of Tiananmen and the collapse of the USSR. Except for hard-line anticommunists, voters didn’t care about Ford’s post-Helsinki gaffe, and Bush’s foreign policy problem with the electorate wasn’t that swing voters were outraged by insufficient outrage over Tiananmen or the “Chicken Kiev” speech, but that he spent almost all of his time on foreign policy to the perceived neglect of voters’ main economic and domestic concerns. Foreign policy idealism and humanitarian interventionism did not win Clinton a second term; a boring, plodding domestic policy reform agenda and a humming economy did that. Even if I disagreed with how Obama’s response to the Iranian election, it would be clear to me that he is trying to keep both his foreign policy and domestic agenda from being derailed, which is what one would expect from any President not yet five months into his first term.

P.S. It goes without saying that if Obama had taken a more ardently pro-Mousavi line, he would be catching flak from many of the same people who would attack his response as naive “Yes We Can” idealism detached from harsh realities. What is striking is how many of Obama’s more hawkish critics are prepared to argue that U.S. policy should be defined by syrupy sentimentality, hope and a lot of empty talk (all of the things they have accused Obama of offering in the past), while Obama has so far opted for caution, humility and restraint.

They [the Iranians] have said this plan is rooted in their fundamental religious beliefs and doctrines regarding the return of their God to Earth. ~Peter Ferrara

Um, the Mahdi is not “their God,” because Twelver Shi’ites don’t believe that God was ever on earth, and indeed they take a dim view of people who do believe this. If Ferrara cannot get even this much right about the fundamental religious beliefs of Iran’s government, why would we trust anything else he has to say on this?

The outlines of that split don’t strike me as entirely clear, with old allies deeply disagreeing and Buchanan not exactly where you’d expect him. But if anybody’s got a lucid interpretation, send it my way. ~Ben Smith

The disagreements among the “old allies” Smith notes aren’t really that deep, and Buchanan is pretty much exactly where one would expect him to be. Supporters of Mousavi on the American right and those who preferred to mock the entire exercise as a sham from the beginning are not very far apart at all. The former believe that there was a slight chance for some democratic change, however small and superficial the differences between the candidates, and because they remain wedded to embarrassing democratist enthusiasms of the past decade they are committed to backing the relatively more “pro-Western” side just as they did during the “color” revolutions. The latter believe that the fix was always in because they narrowly judge everything about Iran through the lens of Iran’s foreign policy and nuclear proliferation. Because Mousavi did not differ significantly on these questions from his rival, they regard the election as meaningless, they regard the conventional distinctions between Iranian hard-liners and moderates to be equally meaningless, and they laugh at the idea that the Iranian regime had any “real” democratic element at any time since the revolution.

Most of those Smith mentions share the same goal, however, which is to oust Ahmadinejad and ultimately to bring down the current Iranian regime, which pretty much all of them regard as an intolerable and major threat. The hawks want to hasten what they see as the collapse of the regime from within, which they think will happen faster if Ahmadinejad remains in power, while most of the others seem to be content with gushing sentimentally about people power and waxing nostalgic about 1989.

Overall, it’s clear that Iran As The Enemy is a narrative that many in the West are loath to abandon. Ahmadinejad has allies, indeed. ~Aziz Poonawalla

Of course, it is the broad, bipartisan consensus embracing the “coup” interpretation of the election that is doing far more to preserve and entrench the “Iran As The Enemy narrative” than anything anti-Iranian hawks have done recently. When Ezra Klein of all people is pushing the “Iranian government is irrational and unpredictable” meme, the only beneficiaries are those who have been demanding more hard-line, confrontational policies. Ahmadinejad does have allies of a sort in the West. Perversely, they are the people who are shouting the loudest on behalf of his opponent and changing the color schemes of their blogs. After all, as an authoritarian populist Ahmadinejad is much more likely to gain strength from foreign vilification, especially if it turns out that a majority of Iranian voters actually did vote for him. As an Iranian national security hawk, Ahmadinejad stands to gain domestically from any dynamic in which the outside world is condemning and criticizing the Iranian government. Nationalists thrive in an atmosphere in which they can portray themselves as defending and standing up for the nation against the rest of the world.

Having pilloried Mousavi as an agent of corrupt clerics, whom he may have effectively scapegoated for Iran’s economic problems, Ahmadinejad could probably use the widespread foreign criticism of the election to his advantage in a similar way to distract attention from his own actions and failures. Our own politicians rail against anti-American leaders and anti-American sentiment around the world for much the same reason, and they will exaggerate the hostility and the danger from other states to keep the public from paying close attention to their own mismanagement of national affairs. It seems clear that Ballen and Doherty are right to warn that “[a]llegations of fraud and electoral manipulation will serve to further isolate Iran and are likely to increase its belligerence and intransigence against the outside world.” The advocates of the “coup” view might respond by saying, “Well, we don’t want that to happen, but we can’t ignore the fraud,” but this assumes not only that there was large-scale fraud, which is likely, but also that it was necessary to Ahmadinejad’s victory, which is much less so.

When neoconservatives complained about the Iranian government in recent years and urged military action against its nuclear program, most people, including the former President, had the good sense to stop listening. Some neoconservatives are now glad to have Ahmadinejad to kick around for at least four more years, because he seems to make it easier for them to demonize Iran, and other hawks take for granted that Ahmadinejad must be the legitimate winner because the contempt they have for him extends to the majority of Iranians. That doesn’t necessarily invalidate other, independent arguments that the election was not stolen. Bizarrely, it is the people who are disgusted with this neocon satisfaction with the “clarity” Ahmadinejad’s victory provides who are doing so much to help make neoconservative support for confrontation with Iran more viable.

Oddly, George Packer breaks his own rule and makes a point of crafting his response to the election in such a way so as not to sound like the neocons he criticizes. Indeed, I suspect that there is something of a knee-jerk reaction among chastened former supporters of the war in Iraq against whatever they perceive to be the hard-line neoconservative/hawkish position. If Pipes and Boot are satisfied with an Ahmadinejad victory for whatever reason, the reasoning seems to be, it simply must not be true that he would have won the election regardless of any fraud. Maddeningly, this reaction ends up aiding the hawks here at home just as Western condemnations of the election results seem more likely to shore up Ahmadinejad’s domestic support than to undermine it.

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this. ~George Friedman

This matter of polling seems quite relevant, since I have heard quite often about these late polls showing Mousavi ahead by large margins or neck-and-neck with his opponent. This is treated as significant proof that massive fraud must have occurred. For much of our presidential election, we were frequently hearing about the “cell-phone effect” and the possibility that traditional phone polls were missing a lot of new voters who only used their cell phones. What if there were an even more distorting “no phone effect” that would make the results of polls skew heavily in favor of those who were far more likely to support Mousavi? What if Mousavi’s reported late surge was a chimera? How much of the Mousavi voters’ outrage is of the 1972 “no one I know voted for Nixon” variety? What if Iran’s so-called “silent majority” is not opposed to the regime as it currently exists as most observers seem to assume? The most important question might be this: why haven’t we been asking these and other questions from day one?

Friedman continues:

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

Friedman goes on to mention piety, corruption and national security as these three issues. Certainly, I thought that Ahmadinejad would pay a price for the country’s economic woes, but I may have erred by assuming that economic woes necessarily translated into anti-incumbent sentiment in Iranian presidential elections. What if Iranian voters are attracted to Ahmadinejad’s populist measures, even though the policies pursued under his tenure have been exacerbating Iran’s economic problems rather than ameliorating them? Suppose that “it’s not the economy, stupid” in Iran despite current economic woes. Why should Iranian elections be any less likely to turn on “values” questions than ours? Indeed, given the openly religious character of the regime and the still-limited power of the Iranian presidency, both of which would minimize the importance of technocratic policy debate, why wouldn’t “values” issues have an even greater role? Here is the most heretical thought of all: what if Ahmadinejad appears to a majority to be the real reformer, and Mousavi is seen as an ally of a corrupt establishment? The ambiguity and amorphousness of what “reform” means in the Iranian context should make us more careful in how we think about the political realities of the country.

Suppose for a moment that most Iranians see Ahmadinejad as a majority of Americans sees Obama. No doubt this will be considered an unspeakable comparison, but just think about it for a moment. Perhaps they like him personally, give him the benefit of the doubt, and find his opponents and their proposals to be ridiculous. As important as it is to understand the contesting interest groups involved, we should not rule out the role of personality and charisma in election outcomes. We see Ahmadinejad as a blundering buffoonish thug, but that does not mean that this is how most Iranians see him. Perhaps Iranian voters respond to economic insecurity by rallying to a religious, cultural populism that offers them some feeling of control and restored social stability. Perhaps they really do look askance at predominantly urban proponents of economical liberalization–it would hardly be the first time that the latter would be out of step with the broad majority of their countrymen.

Friedman continues:

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Lower East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

One of the claims made in the “coup” argument is that it is implausible that there would be a swing in the electorate from backing Khatami just eight years ago to backing Ahmadinejad. It is quite possible that the events of the last eight years have changed voting preferences in Iran just as they have here. We might remember that two of the most lopsided presidential elections in our history occurred just eight years apart in 1964 and 1972, and the winners came from different parties and ostensibly represented significantly different political platforms. Without putting too much emphasis on such comparisons, they should make us think again about what we think we know about the last few days.

Ezra Klein believes that the case for the “rationality” of the Iranian regime has been “fundamentally weakened” by the events of the last few days. Let us grant for the purposes of this discussion that the Iranian election was not only marred by fraud, but that the fraud was essential to an Ahmadinejad victory. As I would have thought Klein could see, the more vital to retaining power stealing the election becomes to thwarting Mousavi and Rafsanjani’s bid for power, the more rational (i.e., predictably self-interested) stealing the election becomes for Ahmadinejad and his allies. In other words, a large-scale fraud that swung the election back to the incumbent is the easiest to reconcile with a rational regime, which predictably wants to preserve the status quo and consolidate its power. It would be far harder to explain large-scale fraud that the incumbent did not need in order to win, except that that this, too, could be understood in terms of consolidating power.

This is not a high form of rationality, I suppose, but when people argue that the Iranian government is rational rather than self-destructive and crazy they do not mean that its members have achieved philosophical apatheia. It means that they have limited, achievable objectives, they have defined interests and will act in a self-interested fashion to pursue those interests. Most despots and authoritarians are rational actors in this way: we know what they want, how they mean to achieve it and how they can be dissuaded or cajoled. When someone says that the Iranian government is irrational and cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, for example, he is saying that they are religious maniacs who will stop at nothing to destroy their enemies, and he is saying that they are so driven by eschatological obsessions that they will happily annihilate themselves and their entire country for the cause. If we assume, as Klein does, that the stolen election is blatant, obvious and undeniable, we should all be even more relieved, because it means that the people running large parts of the Iranian government are probably just shabby politicians through and through who will go to great lengths to preserve their power and privileges. Not exactly the stuff of zealous self-annihilation, is it? Corrupt politicians who steal elections are not the sort to believe in moral victories and going down in a blaze of glory–they are the type that wants to survive. It seems implausible that these are the same people who want to usher in the apocalypse.

Klein’s second point regarding the impact of these events on U.S. policy towards Israel-Palestine may be correct, but for the life of me I can’t quite understand what one should have to do with the other. Klein wrote:

The second is that it is likely to disrupt what was, to my mind, a very positive trend in the United States: the long-overdue effort to pressure Israel on the settlements. Among America’s points of leverage was that Israel desperately needed our help to handle Iran. Among the trends freeing our hand was the apparent quieting of Iran’s drumbeat of provocations.

This is where Klein really loses me. Iranian treatment of the opposition protesters is certainly provocative and ugly from what we have seen, but do we have any reason to think that the “drumbeat of provocations” outside Iran will grow louder? Some people simply assume that repression at home and adventurism abroad are necessarily linked and that one presages the other, but there are plenty of authoritarian regimes that do not follow this pattern. Consolidating power at home consumes attention and resources, which will tend to distract from meddling elsewhere. Furthermore, if Israel “desperately” needs U.S. help to handle Iran, how has the election outcome and the protests afterward changed any of this? Has Israel’s need lessened? On top of all that, why do we keep linking Iran with the issue of settlements? There is no necessary or obvious connection, except that the Israeli government keeps bringing up Iran as a distraction from the question of Palestine. Had Mousavi prevailed, Iran’s nuclear program would not have halted, nor would its foreign policy have changed substantively, which means that as far as the rest of the world is concerned Iran’s election controversy is not and never was all that significant, so why should it derail Washington’s attempts to bring pressure on the settlement issue?