Negotiations with Iran Would be a Sham

As David Frum and Richard Perle quipped in em>An End to Evil<, Iranian elections are a contest between "a fanatical fundamentalist, a really fanatical fundamentalist, and a really, really fanatical fundamentalist." This year, it looked as if the powers-that-be in Tehran were content to allow the fanatical fundamentalist, Mir Hossein Mousavi, emerge as the new President of Iran.

From a geopolitical standpoint, this made plenty of sense. Following President Obama's Cairo speech and the Lebanese elections, the White House had been harboring the delusion that Cairo would single-handedly beat back Islamists every hot spot in the Muslim world. A Mousavi victory would have fed into this perspective and been taken by our President as a sign that Iran was finally "unclenching its fist." Negotiations could have begun forthwith, and the centrifuges would have kept spinning.

Instead, the outpouring of support for the most liberal of the Council of Guardians' hand-picked candidates seems to have struck a nerve for Supreme Leader Khamenei. No doubt he remembered the years of gamesmanship that followed the last time the regime accepted the election of the "fanatical fundamentalist", Mohammed Khatami, in 1997. Khatami, like Mousavi, wanted to preserve the Islamic Republic. One might have called his ideology "velayat-e-faqih with a human face." Like Dub?ek and Gorbachev, Khatami saw the movement he represented turn strongly against the regime, demanding not simply a little crumb of freedom, but the whole pie. Ultimately, these hopes were dashed when Khatami chose to assist in suppressing the worst rioting the country had seen since the overthrow of the shah, the July 1999 student protests. Later, Khatami would address the country on television and admit the hard-liners had so fully boxed him in that he no longer had any real power.

No doubt Khamenei decided that this was not the time to empower another Khatami, which would force the clerics to focus more on the regime's survival and contingency planning against Mousavi and his young supporters than on supporting terrorism and developing nuclear weapons. Like most authoritarians, Khamenei might appreciate having global public opinion on his side (as would have no doubt happened had Mousavi been elected); but not at the expense of his own personal power. Hence, the sloppy fraud of Ahmadinejad's re-election was announced to the world.

We can only hope that this travesty of justice will wake up the dreamers in the White House. Right now, the Iranian dissidents need the American president to use his profound eloquence to make their case in the court of world opinion. They do not need him to come to Tehran to snap photos with "Dr. A'jad" and hold negotiations that will be as much of a sham as this election was.