Roger Cohen received a lot of grief earlier this year for attempting to show other sides of Iran besides the one offered up by jingoists, and he deserves credit for having done that, but you have to wonder what he’s thinking when he says this:

The president has been right to tread carefully, given poisonous American-Iranian history, but has erred on the side of caution. He sounds like a man rehearsing prepared lines rather than the leader of the free world. A stronger condemnation of the violence and repression is needed, despite Khamenei’s warnings. Obama should also rectify his erroneous equating, from the U.S. national security perspective, of Ahmadinejad and Moussavi.

It is precisely “from the U.S. national security perspective” that the two of them are most alike. For the record, Obama did not equate them, but at most minimized the differences between them, which were exaggerated in the course of the campaign and in the eyes of Western observers. Whether or not Mousavi’s modestly different foreign policy views won him some votes (they probably did), those views are not why huge crowds have been protesting in the streets, nor on the whole is it why they wanted to defeat Ahmadinejad at the polls. Iranians probably are tired of the government throwing money at Hizbullah when their own economic woes are so severe, but it was probably the country’s economic and social conditions that boosted Ahmadinejad’s opponents rather than his international buffoonery.

Incidentally, has anyone else noticed how readily Obama supporters have forgotten their campaign-era arguments that it was Khamenei, not Ahmadinejad, who really mattered when it came to negotiations? Whenever someone mocked Obama about negotiating with Ahmadinejad, citing the latter’s belligerent rhetoric as a reason not to talk to him, his supporters used to point out, reasonably enough, that Ahmadinejad had limited power and no real control over the nuclear program anyway. Back then, Obama supporters were pointing to the structure of the deep state to explain why Ahmadinejad was not all that important. Now the structure of the deep state is to be ignored, and personalities are once more taking center stage. Why is it that so many of them have adopted the hawks’ preoccupation with the relatively powerless position of Iranian President? Obama seems not to have forgotten who is actually in charge of the Iranian government, which is why he said what he said, but many of his most earnest backers during our presidential election suddenly see great significance on matters of proliferation and foreign policy in exchanging one president for another.

In any case, Obama cannot rectify something he didn’t get wrong, and there is actually no benefit for Mousavi from Obama stressing how much more pliant and cooperative with the United States’ policies Mousavi is likely to be. Indeed, I cannot think of anything more clearly helpful to Mousavi and his supporters than to have the President affirm that they are no less supportive of Iranian ambitions and security than their opponents. This is not only true, but it may prove to be politically useful to Mousavi and his supporters as well. At the very least, it will do him no harm among Iranians. Practically the only people at the moment who care whether Mousavi is “better” on nuclear proliferation and foreign policy from the American perspective are, remarkably enough, Americans. Most of the people whose opinion of Mousavi is likely to change because of this are Americans.

As for stronger condemnation of the violence, why is it needed? What good would it actually do? Someone needs to make an argument why the protesters need such a condemnation to further their cause, and then this same person would need to explain why it is the business of the United States government to do that. If it is only American and Western audiences that are dissatisfied with Obama’s statements, perhaps that is as it should be. After all, whose need is being fulfilled by taking a “stronger” line? If it is merely an American need to have the President act as “leader of the free world,” even when doing so is the clumsy, ham-handed move that will harm both the protesters and U.S. interests, Obama should refuse to satisfy it. Obama has been cautious, but it is far from clear that he has erred in being so.

It’s a marked contrast to Bush, who let the Middle East grow mold for seven years [bold mine-DL] and then pressed Condi to hurry up and do something at a time by which players in the region knew she carried no weight anyway. ~Michael Tomasky

Is Tomasky kidding? From the context, it’s probably the case that Tomasky means “Israel-Palestine” or “the peace process” when he says “the Middle East,” but that’s hardly an improvement. One of the most tiresome things in Western media coverage of the region is the way in which Israel-Palestine becomes “the Mideast,” so that people can be taken seriously when they say that “the Mideast” is a place defined by violence and upheaval, when in fact most of the region is not. The region and one small part of it are not interchangeable, even if we are unduly preoccupied with that part. Neglecting the peace process didn’t mean that Bush was inactive or uninvolved in the region generally. This is the man who called Sharon a “man of peace” and backed his government to the hilt, whose Secretary of State chirped idiotically about “the birth pangs of a new Middle East” while half of Lebanon was reduced to rubble with his connivance and approval, and who, one may recall, launched a rather large invasion of Iraq. One could have only wished that he paid the entire region enough neglect to allow for the gathering of mold, rather than setting half of it on fire.

While we’re at it, let’s address this business of how “surprising” it is that Obama has been so active on the foreign policy front. Throughout the campaign from the earliest days, he made clear that he had a very ambitious agenda overseas (too ambitious for my taste), and during the primaries and at least the first half of the general election most of his main arguments against Clinton and McCain were on foreign policy questions. He talked quite often about rebuilding alliances, he announced his intention to address the world’s Muslims, and from the fall of 2007 onwards he made negotiations with “rogue” states a key part of what distinguished his foreign policy from that of his rivals. Obviously, his plan for partial withdrawal from Iraq and his earlier opposition to the war, whatever else I might say about them, were central elements of his candidacy, and they were crucial in catapulting him ahead of the party’s establishment candidate.

Tomasky said earlier:

His project is a new grand strategy that (in theory at least) reestablishes American moral authority in the world, uses it to build coalitions to settle disputes, and as a by-product makes the Democratic Party look a lot more like Harry Truman and a lot less like George McGovern.

This last sentence is just painful, and all the more so because I am quite sure that Tomasky doesn’t actually think the Democratic Party of recent years looks anything like George McGovern (more’s the pity). This phrasing endorses a Liebermanesque critique of most of the Democratic Party’s opposition to the war in Iraq, which Lieberman has desperately sought to portray as a repudiation of the tradition of Cold War liberalism. Just as the GOP has run every election campaign against the specter of McGovern from 1972 until last year, Lieberman has tried to solidify his position as a true inheritor of the Democratic foreign policy tradition by casting everyone else in the party as a new McGovern.

Republicans and Lieberman, who campaigned alongside them, tried to do this to Obama, but it was simply not credible, because to a large extent he had gotten up out of the so-called defensive crouch, and he began to speak and act with confidence on foreign policy and to take for granted that the Republicans were the ones who lacked credibility on the issue–because they did! Iraq had made all of this possible, and his early opposition to the war (however politically convenient it may have been for him in 2002) won him the credibility to claim foreign policy as an issue on which the Democratic candidate had the advantage. Having seen the two candidates’ responses to the war in Georgia, at least early on, and having seen how the two have responded to the Iranian election, we understand why Obama acquired the advantage. In short, even though he was still quite hawkish and interventionist, but he was not a crazy person, and most people could see that.

Most people also assumed that Obama’s lack of formal experience in national office and with foreign policy created a liability for him, and as a matter of conventional political perception this was true, which was why he selected Biden for VP. In practice, though, Obama has acted as if no such liability existed and has taken for granted that it was the longer-serving candidates who embraced the war in Iraq whose foreign policy views were the real liability. At the polls and on the substance, he was largely right.

Why, for example, aren’t Americans and the Twitterverse abuzz about the Egyptian democratic reform movement? Is it because Egypt is under a secular autocracy rather than a religious one? Or something else? ~Aziz Poonawalla

I know Aziz is genuinely curious when he asks this question, but I think the answer is staring us in the face. It’s not just that Egyptian reformers and democrats are much weaker politically and the Egyptian election system (at least prior to the past week) is much less competitive. For one thing, most Americans are not interested in the fortunes of Egypt’s political opposition, because so much of it is still made up by al-Ikhwan, and Washington isn’t interested in undermining a more or less reliable allied dictator. To be very blunt, another key reason is that Ayman Nour and friends haven’t been put on television, so that whereas Mousavi has become much more of a familiar name most people outside of wonks and political junkies have no clue who Nour is.

Putting a face to a name, and putting faces to an entire movement, is extremely important for generating sympathy for foreign political movements. Would the West have been half as animated about the crackdown in Burma two years ago if Aung San Suu Kyi’s picture had not been so widely distributed and her story covered fairly extensively for years and years before that? Probably not. Also, lacking some easily digestible, oversimplified narrative about “pro-Western democrats” struggling against authoritarianism, these movements will often never come to the public’s attention. Good luck selling the Muslim Brotherhood as the vanguard of democracy. (Then again, if Mousavi can be lauded as some sort of champion of liberalism, who knows?) Practically no one paid much attention when Karimov butchered those Islamist protesters in Andijan a few years ago, because the protesters were the wrong kind of people, and the anti-Saakashvili protests earlier this year prompted a collective yawn from most people. Those protests were too complicated in any case, and the Georgian protests might conflict with the earlier story of the virtuous Rose Revolution. The more complicated the story, the harder it is to work oneself up into an enthusiastic lather.

P.S. On that last line, I should also add that all of these stories are complicated, but they are not always perceived as such.

Jeffrey Lord thinks historical memory and national differences are irrelevant. Of course, he does. Philip Klein thinks that what is needed is a lot more cheap talk that will get people killed because some Iranian activist says it sounds like a good idea. The activist was unhappy with Obama’s statement, which sounded to him like, “This is none of our business.” That’s not really what Obama said, but as it happens it is none of our business. Indeed, if there were the slightest chance of Obama being able to do something directly in support of the protesters that might involve risking American lives and interests, at least half of the people belittling him as the anti-Reagan and worse would be shouting about how it is none of our business, and they would be right. Everyone seems very willing to be very bold and zealous for the protesters’ cause so long as it doesn’t cost them anything, and they are even more enthusiastic if it serves as a handy cudgel with which to beat their political opponents here at home.

While we’re at it, let’s remember Reagan had leverage against the Soviets and the Polish government in 1981 because of all that dastardly detente, arms negotiations and the existence of trade relations with Poland. Thanks to thirty years of bankrupt Iran policy, we have very little leverage with the Iranian government, and this is a situation that the President’s critics would like to perpetuate indefinitely. If Obama’s choices are limited to remaining largely silent or saying something reckless, it is the result of thirty years of truly isolationist policy that the President’s critics have supported. Vilification, sanctions and hostility for decades have not made the regime more flexible, open or relaxed, but instead it has become even more inflexible, closed and repressive. Now we’re supposed to listen to the people who backed every failed policy towards Iran?

Update: Klein responds:

And this is about more than “cheap talk,” it’s about the American president using his microphone [bold mine-DL] to stand up for democracy and human rights.

How could I have missed it? This is about the President’s cheap talk, not just any cheap talk. If the President were to follow this advice and “stand up for democracy and human rights,” what would it accomplish? It might make his critics happy, and maybe it would make him feel better. At best, it would provide some momentary consolation to the protesters, while doing nothing else for them, and at worst it would inspire them to take a more confrontational line against the government in the vain hope of foreign assistance. In that case, Obama will have taken a stand, and the protesters will have been beaten down even more severely.

Muslim parties and their allies have suffered election setbacks over the past several years in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco and Pakistan. ~David Ignatius

What’s wrong with this sentence? Of course, we know what Ignatius meant to say. He meant to say Islamist, but isn’t it odd that the word he did use was Muslim? Who exactly does he think is marching in Tehran at the moment? Zoroastrians?

Even if he meant to say Islamist, who won the last Iraqi elections? Oh, yes, more “secular” and “nationalist” parties prevailed, because that’s what they claimed they were, even though the personnel and beliefs of those parties had scarcely changed from earlier years. Da’wa is now secular–good to know! This is also the genius of Lebanese politics: practically every party is officially secular, while in reality almost every party represents a specific sectarian interest. That’s the way elections often work in religiously diverse societies, but that doesn’t mean we have to give so much weight to the official designations of these parties.

One more question: if Mousavi’s forces prevail, who will have won? The Islamists or the non-Islamists? Silly question. For all the talk of democracy, the protesters are invoking the legacy of the Islamic revolution, which they believe has been betrayed, and they are employing the rhetoric of that revolution, which is nothing if not Islamist. Indeed, at the moment their hopes rest to a disproportionate degree with anti-Khamenei clerics who might decide to oust him. Should that happen, I hope that we will not be treated to some convoluted explanation that velayat-e faqih is actually a profoundly secular idea embodying the separation of religion and state, but given the commentary of the last few days I wouldn’t be surprised.

Perhaps it is because I have not been bathed in the soft glow of green enlightenment, but I fail to see what was wrong with this report written on Monday:

Mr. Ahmadinejad is the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical, military and political elite that is more unified and emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution. As president, Mr. Ahmadinejad is subordinate to the country’s true authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who commands final say over all matters of state and faith. With this election, Mr. Khamenei and his protégé appear to have neutralized for now the reform forces that they saw as a threat to their power, political analysts said.

Ahmadinejad is certainly the ruthless front man (his shrewdness might well be called into question at this point), and he is subordinate to Khamenei, who does have the final say. Together, they do appear to have neutralized the reform forces, because those forces have been reduced to protesting in the streets to little effect. It is improbable that these forces are going to acquire power, and they do not have the means to take it from the authorities, and so they have been for all intents and purposes stymied and neutralized. Remember, this is a news report. It is not an editorial opining on whether or not this is a good outcome. But it is the outcome, or at least it was quite reasonable to make such a statement about what appeared to be the case three days ago. Three days later, this description seems reasonably accurate. Unless something dramatic changes in the next week or two, these protests are going to exhaust themselves, peter out and dissipate, which is all that the regime needs to keep going. No one has to like this, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

Andrew may wince, but the President’s statement on the lack of significant policy differences between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi is just simply true. More precisely, it is true with respect to all of the foreign policy and national security questions that are at the top of any list of outstanding differences between Washington and Tehran. If Mousavi differs from Ahmadinejad in these areas at all, it is as a matter of presentation, tone and style, not on the substance of the policy.

Mousavi’s spokesman complained that Obama probably doesn’t like being identified with Bush, but there are times when recognizing continuity between the two is appropriate and realistic. There are times when they really do have the same policies. There are other issues where the differences between them couldn’t be more clear, as Bush made a point of reminding us this week. These differences may not be very great in the grand scheme of things, inasmuch as Obama and Bush broadly agree about American “leadership,” power projection and an expansive definition of national interest, but they exist. Compared to the differences between Obama and Bush on foreign policy, which are few but real enough, Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are even closer together. Before the election, someone called Mousavi Iran’s Kerry, which was a bit of an insult to Kerry, because by 2004 even Kerry was farther away from Bush on foreign policy than Mousavi is from Ahmadinejad today.

This is to be expected. In any political system, the candidates that are deemed acceptable and within the national “mainstream” will not differ from each other very much. In the Iranian system, where all candidates are vetted ahead of time to ensure that the differences are even smaller and their acceptance of established security and foreign policies is even more certain, this is even more the case. Besides, as Obama’s supporters never tired of stating in his defense during the campaign, it is the Supreme Leader and not the Iranian President who sets policy and has the real control anyway, which tends to drive home just how unimportant the differences between the two men are in this case. As much as people might say things like, “Ma mitavanim” (we can) there are things that Iranians really cannot do that American voters still can. They cannot vote for someone who would introduce fundamental policy changes in these areas, because no one who would make those changes is permitted to participate. We all know there are constraints that force our presidential nominees to hew towards certain conventional “centrist” policies that the political class endorses and defends, and in Iran the constraints are even stronger and the means for loosening them even fewer.

However much people may want to liken Mousavi to Obama, they are really nothing alike, and you have to marvel at Obama supporters who would want to draw such a comparison. Obama has plenty of faults, but he has not executed domestic political opponents by the thousands. Obama may be an establishmentarian by instinct, which is how he got to where he is, but Mousavi has always been a part of the establishment in Iran. If we focus on the individual leaders to find some indication of changes in policy, we are fooling ourselves. In the best-case scenario, Mousavi is a rallying point around and a vehicle through which an entirely different kind of political force can organize.

Provided that we don’t exaggerate this point, I should say that personal differences in political leaders can be important. One need only compare the ridiculous John McCain and his response to the events in Tehran with Obama’s measured and responsible actions to be reminded that personality and character can make a difference in the conduct of the affairs of state, but more important than the difference between Obama’s reserve and McCain’s hot-headed recklessness are their different attitudes towards Iran. Obama may remain firmly aligned with the American establishment in rejecting Iranian nukes and keeping the military option “on the table,” but he does not disdain negotiations with Tehran as McCain does. As small as that difference is, it makes a difference. Could there be similarly small, but significant differences between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad? Of course. But no one should oversell this or place too much hope in Iranian policy changing dramatically as a result, just as no one should expect Medvedev to differ greatly from Putin on those issues that the Kremlin believes are central to Russian interests and national security.

So it is possible for Jeffrey Lord to write about something other than racism. Then again, maybe he should stick to what he knows. Apparently unaware that he has rendered his entire anti-Obama argument irrelevant with just one quote, Lord cites Reagan from 1981 regarding the Solidarity strike:

I wanted to be sure we did nothing to impede this process and everything we could to spur it along.

Reagan was making sense when he said that, and there is a reasonable argument that this is exactly Obama’s approach to the Iranian election. In the 1981 episode, it may have made sense and been entirely appropriate to speak out on behalf of Soldarity as they were being repressed by the Soviets, which does not mean that it would always be the right response in every situation. Despite the problems with having applied the wrong lessons from 1989 to Iraq, which so many war supporters expected would be readily transformed into a liberal democracy like so many countries in eastern Europe, Lord once again applies the experience of American policy in eastern Europe to the Near East. Just like his fellow war supporters, Lord gets it wrong.

As others have probably already observed, there is a difference between a native workers’ uprising against a system sustained by a foreign military presence and an internal political conflict among members of the same nation. There are historical differences between the two countries, and significant differences in the relationships with Western powers. There was little chance that Polish nationalists would be offended by Western expressions of support against the Soviets, and it mattered that the Polish view of Western intervention was not that it had happened too frequently in their past but that it had been too lacking. While the Poles looked, usually in vain, to the West for direct aid during its many partitions and occupations, Iranians have been on the receiving end of partitions into spheres of influence and direct or indirect domination via proxy governments during the modern era. Practically all of these were orchestrated and supported by Western governments and their allies. That makes direct British and American involvement in this controversy much trickier, and it requires a more subtle, careful response. American critics of the President have remarked on the more forceful statements by the French President and the German Chancellor. They have the luxury of not having the burden of past wrongdoing against Iran, and indeed the Germans in particular enjoy a significant trade relationship with Iran, which puts Merkel’s critical remarks in an entirely different context from remarks made by the President of the United States, whose predecessor surrounded Iran with war zones and military deployments and declared his intention to topple the current regime.

Had we had the same kind of history with the Poles that we have with the Iranians, our expressions of support might very well have been as ill-advised and counterproductive as expressions of support for the protesters in Iran today by Washington would be. Had our government labeled Poland as evil just a few years before after having imposed sanctions on it for decades, statements in support of Solidarity might not have been as welcome or as encouraging as they were. Of course, any comparison between the two is bound to be misleading, because Reagan was speaking out against the abuses of the Soviet imperial system as part of a prolonged struggle with another superpower. The circumstances were vastly different. The principle that Reagan articulated, which was “to be sure we did nothing to impede this process,” was the right one, but it is bound to have a different application in a country that is nothing like Poland.

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.