Say Anything Blog

There are massive demonstrations going on in Iran in the wake of Ahmadinejad's apparent theft of the presidential election there. Ha'aretz is reporting that Ahmadinejad's rival in the presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has been arrested.

Here is a video of protestors chasing away Iran's security thugs in the streets of Tehran:

What is Obama's reaction to this? Predictably, it is that no matter how brutal, corrupt, anti-democratic or unpopular the regime in Tehran is, we must talk to them.

"In the end, there’s an imperative to try to establish engagement," a senior American official said. “We would certainly give them time," he said, provided that Iran did not use the time to work toward a nuclear bomb.

What could possibly go wrong?

“This is the worst result,” said Thomas R. Pickering, a former under secretary of state. “The U.S. will have to worry about being perceived as pandering to a president whose legitimacy is in question. It clearly makes the notion of providing incentives quite unappetizing.”

Daniel Pipes suggests that Obama's mollifying Cairo apology to the Muslim world didn't work on Iran, and may have backfired:

"The key factor is that it's Khamenei's wishes, not the voter's wishes, that matter," said Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes. "The voters are window dressing, think of it as an advisory role."

Pipes cast the office itself in a similar light, calling the president "more like a press secretary, the outward face but not the decision maker… certainly not on the issues that matter to us."

The office does matter, he added, in terms of Iran's domestic politics and also its foreign policy symbolism, so that while Obama has reached out to Iran, "Had Khameni wished to reciprocate, he would have had Mousavi become the president."

Khameni indeed had the power to do so. Ahmadinejad would not have 'won' this election unless Supreme Leader Khameni wanted it that way.