IRAN - A Window

The courage demonstrated the past few days in Iran - simply remarkable. Few of us are made of this stuff. The protestors remember the Iranian regime’s bloody crackdown of university students in 1999, that many students simply disappeared. Yet they persevere. Their goal is not so much to salvage Mr. Mousavi’s future - he could have been any number of persons - as it is to secure a genuine consensuality in governing their future, meaning the ouster of Khamenei and the rest of the brutal mullahs.

As the WSJ editorialized, "The election was a sham thrice over. Though elected by popular vote, Iran's president is subservient to an unelected Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The four candidates whose names made it on the presidential ballot this year were pre-screened by an unelected Guardian Council composed mostly of Islamic clerics, which also disqualified more than 400 others. What's remarkable is that these leaders still felt the need to rig the results."

The administration has made this out to be far too complex for any of them to understand, freighted with all sorts of political and ambassadorial nuance. Bull. Bottom feeders always reach for complexity in an attempt to escape. Instead, now is the time for Obama to act. Through the primaries and the election we highlighted what we knew was Obama’s #1 vulnerability - that he was profoundly out of his league in foreign affairs. We were right. Obama has so far given more attention and concern to former enemies than to allies; he believes that provocative acts are the result of a misunderstanding, not planned aggression, that all disputes involve equal culpability, that there are no bad buys. We can see Obama running to the playground swing set, he, Kim and Khamenei pumping away.

Perhaps Obama wants the Iranian dictatorship- Khamenei and his cronies - to stabilize itself so he can get back to the work of appeasing it. On Sat, the White House claimed they were merely "monitoring" the situation. On Monday, State’s spokesman Ian Kelly said the US is "deeply troubled" by events in Iran but would not condemn them. "We need to see how things unfold," he said. "You need to see more heads cracked in the middle of the street?" Fox News James Rosen shot back.

So we doubt that Obama will select this window of opportunity, certainly the greatest potential gift to the West in the three years we have followed the Iranian situation. We want BO to prove us wrong. The US now has the excuse to apply leverage, and, we have our teammates in Iran to see to the final result - a functioning democracy. The tool remains what it has always been - a gasoline sanction, or better yet, blockade. We can lever the present turmoil to the benefit of the Iranian people, and, to the benefit of the West. We are looking out for own self interest in doing so; those posted in history know that (with the single exception of Greek city state conflict) democracies do not war upon one another.

Robert Craven