Whereas the Reagan administration in the 1980s could do little to help Iranians (Ronald Reagan’s determined efforts to engage the clerical regime over the hostages in Lebanon certainly didn’t strengthen “moderates” in Tehran), Mr. Obama could do vastly more. By throwing in his lot with the freedom movement, he would surely increase the odds that we won’t have to live with a nuclear bomb controlled by virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic clerics. Democrats, once the champions of promoting pro-democracy movements, need to understand that the good that they can do for the people of Iran far exceeds the great harm that comes from doing nothing. ~Reuel Marc Gerecht

As Andrew says, this Gerecht op-ed is not at all persuasive. All of the usual baseless assertions are there: Obama can “throw his lot” in with the Green movement (how?), this will increase the odds that a non-existent Iranian bomb won’t be controlled by the current batch of clerics (why?), and Obama can do “vastly more” than Reagan did (what?). It is very much like Stephens’ column in simply presuming that Obama had the ability to help the Green movement constructively and chose not to use that ability.

When the Bush administration basically stood by and watched as the Burmese junta crushed the peaceful protests in Rangoon three years ago, few people were daft enough to claim that Bush had failed to act aggressively enough on behalf of the “Saffron” revolution. Sane people recognized that there was not much that Bush or anyone else in the U.S. could do. Something worth remembering here is that sanctions imposed on Burma to punish the regime have simply suffocated the opposition and destroyed the middle class. Anyone who did attack Bush for failing to “throw his lot” in with Burmese protesters while also urging ever-stricter sanctions on the regime would now look quite ridiculous. Of course, the same ridiculous combination of rhetorical support for Iran’s opposition combined with a vindictive desire for “crippling sanctions” can be found in the writings of practically every Iran hawk.

Another baseless assertion that Iran hawks like making is one that Gerecht makes a little later:

The movement is no longer just about liberalizing the state: it is now all about regime change.

If Hooman Majd and Mehdi Khalaji understand Iran, and I am persuaded that they understand far more about it than most people commenting on the subject in the Western media, this “regime change” interpretation of the Green movement is fundamentally, horribly wrong. If “Green activists insist that they seek reform and not revolution or regime change,” as Khalaji wrote, no one in the West is doing them any favors by ignoring what they claim to seek and substituting an entirely different agenda as if it were their own. Gerecht makes another mistake when he writes:

Ayatollah Khamenei is far more likely to compromise on nuclear weapons if he feels he’s about to be undone by the Green Movement.

This makes no sense. A government secure at home and certain that its opponents cannot threaten it has the confidence to take risks in negotiating and compromising with other states on important security issues. If the threat from the opposition ever became great enough that the survival of the current government was in doubt, regime leaders would become extremely inflexible in their positions on anything they perceive as relating to national security. Compromising on Iran’s nuclear program could make the current government appear weak and provide an opening for the opposition to channel nationalist discontent against the government.

Perhaps the most misleading part of Gerecht’s op-ed is the part that seemed at first to be almost a throwaway remark, but which he intended to be central to his argument. Gerecht wants us to side with the “friends of Karl Popper,” and he concludes that the Green movement is filled with “friends of Karl Popper” because some reform leaders and movement intellectuals are interested in Popper’s ideas. This is a quick sleight-of-hand on Gerecht’s part as he mentions how Khatami and Soroush have engaged with some of Popper’s ideas, and then transfers their interest in Popper to the entire movement, and this is supposed to lead us to believe that the entire movement is made up of “friends of Karl Popper.” Leaving aside how shaky a lot of Popper’s own analysis in The Open Society and Its Enemies was, I doubt that the simplistic opposition between the “open society” and totalitarianism that made sense to Popper in the mid-twentieth century will be all that useful and appropriate for Iran’s opposition, many of whose leaders still value the legacy of Khomeini.

For their part, the Iranian “friends of Karl Popper” should be very wary of the heirs of the people that Popper called the historicists, who confidently proclaim that their ideology is going to prevail and that history is on their side. The historicists that Popper was referring to believed that they had gleaned the fundamental principles of history and therefore understood how to implement these principles to create an imagined just society. Perversely, many of the latter-day Western enthusiasts of the “open society” and supposed admirers of Karl Popper regularly indulge in the historicist error that Popper deeply loathed.