Obama and Iran: No Good Options

The Iranian elections may have been a farce, but this much is certain: Millions of Iranians believe last week's election was stolen by the regime headed by fanatical hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Hundreds of thousands of supporters loyal to challenger Mir Hussein Moussavi took to the streets of Tehran in protest yesterday, and several were shot by pro-Ahmadinejad militias.

Some of the marchers' placards were in English. Guess who they wanted to read those signs? And whether they know it or not inside the White House, President Obama now faces his first official foreign policy crisis. The immediate question is what he and his administration should say and do about it? What can they do?

Here in Washington, the partisan fault lines formed quickly, albeit less shrilly than usual. Liberals, for the most part, expressed the view that Obama's options are limited, and that if the U.S. were to make too much fuss about the fraudulent election we'd undermine the very people we want to help. Conservatives tended to see an opportunity for the president to stake out the high ground and plant the rhetorical freedom flag forcefully and quickly.

"The options are, of course, limited; and nothing can be done to overturn the election," Pete Wehner, who headed the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, told me Monday. "What can be done is to interpret them, to speak about them in an honest way – which isn't everything by any means. But it's not nothing, as we have learned many times, including when Ronald Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.'"

"We are told all the time that Obama has huge credibility with the Muslim and Arab world, based on who he is and what he says," Wehner continued. "If he speaks with moral clarity on this matter, I think it would be important. That doesn't mean he can undo the elections, anymore than Reagan's words could undo the 'evil empire.' But words matter, and they should be mobilized on behalf of the right things, at least in my estimation."

On Sunday, Bill Kristol, publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, put it this way when asked what Obama should do: "He should support the demonstrators. He should say that stealing elections is unacceptable, killing demonstrators in the streets of Tehran is unacceptable. He could work with the Europeans to say, 'Let's bring in international observers to review whether this was a fair election. If it wasn't, let's think about having another election.' Secretary Clinton can place a phone call to Mousavi to make sure that he's okay and is not under house arrest. There are a million things the U.S. could do symbolically to try to strengthen the forces of those in Tehran who want to prevent the Revolutionary Guard and Ahmadinejad from totally taking over the country."

Kristol is exaggerating – there aren't a million options for Obama – but Wehner is not. He is actually showing restraint, perhaps remembering the lesson of George W. Bush's too-quick recognition of the coup leaders who believed that they had replaced Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Bush sided against Chavez and, seemingly, even against democracy, a mistake Chavez made Bush pay for many times over in the years to come as he sought to isolate the United States, make a martyr of himself, and tighten his vice grip on Venezuelan society.

In other words, Obama could make the Iran situation even worse for the Iranian people. Brookings Institution scholar Kenneth M. Pollack, who worked in the Clinton White House as director of Persian Gulf affairs for the National Security Council, answered in one word when I asked him what Obama should do about the Iranian elections. "Nothing," he replied.

Being an academic, Pollack couldn't leave it at that, of course, and he amplified on that answer. "The United States is the third rail of Iranian politics," Pollack said. "Nothing we say is going to help the people we want to help. What's more, we don't know the truth -- the U.S. government cannot say definitely that the election was rigged."

This is no small matter, not knowing what's going on inside Iran, but intelligence and operational failures there have been systemic for decades. The CIA originally got the United States in this mess by helping orchestrate a 1953 coup that brought the Shah of Iran to power, and alienated the Iranian clerics and professionals against the U.S. for a generation. That, in turn, resulted in the long reign of the now-deceased Ayatollah Khomenei, an event the Agency evidently never saw coming.

Obama's CIA chief is former California congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta. In his first few weeks on the job, Panetta has made headlines by sticking up for his Langley crew at the expense of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and by asserting, rather intemperately, that former vice president Dick Cheney is so desperate for vindication that he's all but rooting for another attack on the United States. From the outside, it seems that Panetta's time would be better spent kicking butt at the CIA until they start providing good information to the White House about Iran and throughout the Middle East.

On this point, Pollack sticks up for the CIA, where he worked for seven years. "Without making excuses for my old organization, this one is probably beyond their reach," he said in an email. "The Iranian leadership is way too fractious, too personalized and too paranoid for us to be able to know what they hell they are up to. I give a talk on Iran called "I Don't Know and It Depends," the theme of which is that if you want to be an Iran expert you just have to know those two phrases because they are the correct answer to 99 percent of the questions out there on Iran. The whole point of the talk is that the Iranian government is so Byzantine that it is impossible even for regime insiders to know what they are going to do next. In the end, the only thing that matters is what is going on in Khamenei's head, and no amount of intel is going to help with that."

Yet not knowing what Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is thinking is quite a disadvantage. The Shiite cleric initially congratulated Ahmadinejad on his victory, then reversed fields and ordered an investigation. Is that complete window dressing? No one in Washington seems to know. If the investigation proves to be a whitewash, it would have been best for western governments not to have gotten their hopes up. In that instance, Obama would still have to deal with Ahmadinejad – and could still deal with him. On the other hand, if it is a legitimate inquiry, American pressure could only backfire. "We do not want to prejudice that investigation!" Pollack said. "It would be a disaster if we made a big stink and the Iranians ... certified Ahmadinejad's victory just as a way of showing that they would not bow to U.S. pressure. So the only reasonable thing we can do is wait."

So far, this is precisely how the administration is handling things. Perhaps that's the realistic play – the correct lesson to take away from Bush's Venezuela debacle. Or maybe it's just reflective of Obama's temperament. Either way, it may be the smart move. Remember in the movie Cool Hand Luke where George Kennedy gets bluffed out of a poker game by Paul Newman, with a weak hand? After the game ends, Luke concedes he was holding nothing, adding, "Sometimes nothin' can be a pretty cool hand."

A critic of the go-slow approach would point out that the problem here is that the movie that comes to mind ain't Cool Hand Luke, but Dr. Strangelove, what with Ahmadinejad being all hell-bent on acquiring a nuclear war-making capability (not to mention being one of the most virulent anti-Semites this side of the 1940s). In other words, we can't afford to mimic Cool Hand Luke, because the stakes are just too high.

History is replete with historic examples of brinksmanship where presidents guessed wrong on such questions as well as right. Would the Soviet Union have overrun all of Berlin if John F. Kennedy had knocked down the Berlin Wall with a tank? Probably not, although we certainly didn't know that at the time.

Would the Iron Curtin have been raised decades earlier had President Eisenhower dispatched NATO troops into Hungary in 1956 as the Soviets held their breaths and hoped we would not. Perhaps. The answer this time isn't any easier. Congress keeps raising the president's salary. Now you know why.