The Real Loser of the Iran Election: Obama

President Obama is right not to talk too much about Iran.

Words of support from an American president cannot much help the protesters – and may hurt them, by exciting nationalist feelings the regime can exploit against them.

Worse, such words stake the credibility of the United States, implying promises of support that will not be realized. Hungary 1956 is the obvious precedent, but there have been too many other cases in recent years of presidents issuing rhetorical rubber checks.

Besides: while the protests against Iran’s apparently rigged election result do look like an outpouring of democratic sentiment, the US should be properly wary of anything that might look like an endorsement of Hossein Mousavi – a dubious enough character in his own right.

At the same time, if President Obama’s immediate response has been right, his long-term approach to Iran remains ominously wrong.

While his administration continues to condemn an Iranian nuclear weapon as “unacceptable,” the president himself has been signaling for a year that his goal is to reach some kind of agreement that can be (mis)represented as removing the “threat” form those weapons. The president’s goal in Iran has always been above all to thread his own political escape from the stark policy alternatives: accept an Iranian bomb or use forceful action to stop it.

If the Iranian regime had allowed Ahmadinejad to lose the presidential election, that result would have offered some hope to Obama that his desire for a face-saving deal might be fulfilled. As is, he has been stranded, left to confront a regime that has shamelessly declared a refusal to conciliate anyone in any measure, its own people above all, but also this now stranded American president.