“Inevitably, you are going to put [new] sanctions on Iran,” Mr. Makhmalbaf told a small group of Iran specialists and journalists in Washington. He said the U.S. should “let the Iranian people know why you are going to sanction and what the targets are so they can support you.”

He rejected proposed U.S. legislation that would target gasoline imports to Iran, saying that would hurt average people. He said it was better to focus on the Revolutionary Guards, who have been at the forefront of repressing demonstrations and who have taken control of considerable elements of the Iranian economy.

You know who also opposes U.S. legislation targeting gasoline imports to Iran? The Iranian regime. For some, this shared interest is quite enough to tar Makhmalbaf as a regime apologist. Those who are genuinely interested in supporting Iran’s opposition — and not just in smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war — understand that this is silly, of course. The Iranian opposition — and its supporters outside the country — include a number of different factions and trends with various end goals and methods of reaching them.

Speaking of smoothing the road toward a U.S.-Iran war, the very same Washington Times also runs an editorial today telling Americans to Get Ready To Bomb Iran:

Force need not be used to be effective, but the threat of force must be credible to have any chance of influencing Iranian behavior. Right now, there is no credible threat emanating from the United States. The Obama administration unambiguously opposes military action against Iran, particularly by Israel. But it would help to have a little ambiguity on this issue. So long as Tehran thinks the United States will work actively to prevent Israel from taking action, it has one less reason to worry. It would be most helpful if the United States began to send signals to Tehran that the United States will assist Israel in its preparations for military action and maybe even participate when the attack ultimately is launched.

If the regime in Tehran is not made to fear serious consequences for its continued intransigence, it has no reason to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

Leaving aside that anyone who talks seriously about bombing Iran has revealed themselves to be no friend of Iran’s opposition — Abbas Milani represents the overwhelming consensus when he writes that “the forces now controlling Iran would be immeasurably strengthened by an American or (especially) Israeli attack” — this shows a pretty serious misapprehension of the situation in Iran right now.

It’s not at all clear that Iran’s ruling hardliners, who are currently weathering the most serious crisis of legitimacy in the Islamic Republic’s history, wouldn’t actually welcome a military strike by either Israel or the U.S. Such a strike, in addition to extinguishing the Green Movement, would effectively end the ongoing debate within the regime over whether to obtain a nuclear weapon in favor of those who have been arguing “yes,” in very much the same way that the preventive U.S. invasion of Iraq convinced Iran’s hardliners that they needed to keep open the option of having a strategic deterrent.

It’s pretty broadly understood across the U.S. defense establishment that a strike on Iran — either by Israel or the U.S. — would very likely result in a number of disastrous consequences, consequences Iran knows that the U.S. would rather avoid. There’s really no credibility to be generated by pretending otherwise.

United Nations and Iranian officials have been secretly negotiating a deal to persuade world powers to lift sanctions and allow Tehran to retain the bulk of its nuclear programme in return for co-operation with UN inspectors. …The plan would require the UN Security Council to revoke the three existing sanctions and five resolutions ordering Iran to halt its uranium enrichment — an unthinkable development at a time when the West is focused on how to impose more, not fewer, sanctions on Iran.

Fox News profiled the story, Rachel Abrams of the Weekly Standard concluded that ElBaradei was a “collaborator with tyrants,” and John Hull writing in the Examiner papers concluded that “Elbaradei conspired with Iraq, as he is now doing with the Islamic Republic of Iran, to hide nuclear weapons from the infidels.” This comes a day after the IAEA released a report accusing the Iranians of misleading the agency over the extent of its nuclear program. A report, Julian Borger of the Guardian said, was “marked by the impatient and sceptical language that has become an increasingly regular feature of the agency’s Iran reports.” This is hardly the tone or the conclusions one would expect from an agency headed by a guy who collaborates with tyrants. But reality rarely matters when developing a conspiracy theory.

Furthermore, the Times story that they have all seized on seems highly dubious for a number of reasons.

First, this apparent “plan,” according to the Times, was put together in September – not November. But this would likely make the Times’ “plan” totally irrelevant, since the talks with Iran in Vienna that resulted in the current deal on the table took place in October. The IAEA has also denied the plan’s existence but if there ever was such a plan it was probably just one of the many possible plans being floated prior to the October meeting.

Second, any “secret deal” negotiated by ElBaradei with the Iranians would ultimately have to be agreed to by the U.S. and other powers – and lifting sanctions definitely won’t be agreed to.

Finally, if this draft plan is current, than none of this really make any sense. If the Times story is right that – “It was thought that Mr ElBaradei was anxious to secure his legacy after infighting over his perceived weakness in dealing with Iran” – then why would he be advancing a plan to remove sanctions that he knows would be dead in the water with the West and which would only serve to exacerbate his “perceived weakness” vis-à-vis Iran.

ElBaradei has been a constant target of the right. He entered their cross hairs after correctly assessing Iraq’s WMD programs and questioning Bush administration claims that a Saddam sponsored mushroom cloud was imminent. So despite the dubious nature of the Times’ claims, the right has grabbed hold of its conclusions and gone crazy with it.

In his remarks yesterday morning at an Iran panel on Capitol Hill, Sen. Joe Lieberman — who claims to support the Obama administration’s Iran engagement policy, having derided it as “naive” while stumping for McCain during the 2008 campaign — set an unrealistically high bar for success in yesterday’s Geneva talks. Reminding the audience that “the Iranian leaders have not yet clearly agreed to put their illicit nuclear activities on the agenda,” Lieberman said:

If the P5+1 plus Iran cannot reach public agreement that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is the major topic of engagement among them today, then there is no point in continuing this process, and we and our allies should get up and leave — promising to return only when and if Iran is willing to begin serious discussions to end their illicit nuclear activities and normalize their relations with the rest of the world, including the United States.

Imagine Joementum’s surprise — and mine, honestly — when the news came that the talks had in fact cleared that bar. Iran not only agreed to make its nuclear program the major topic, the Tehran government “promised to send most of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad.”

Gary Sick has a concise rundown of what yesterday’s meetings actually produced:

Iran agreed to permit inspections of its new site. The Western negotiators came up with a clever ploy to permit Iranian low-enriched uranium (LEU) to be sent to Russia for further enrichment, probably from about 5 percent to about 20 percent, and then transported to France to be fabricated into fuel rods to feed the Iranian research reactor (ironically given to Iran by the United States in an earlier day), which is used to produce isotopes used for medical purposes. This had many dimensions. First, it reduced the Iranian LEU stock below the level required to produce a nuclear device. Second, it established the principle that Iranian enrichment could be conducted outside the country. But third, it promised to provide Iran with uranium enriched well above the level required for nuclear power reactors (but not yet at the level required for bomb-building). And lastly, it tacitly acknowledged Iran’s right to produce enriched uranium. Nothing in the reports we have seen to date indicate that the Western interlocutors insisted on the previous red line that Iran should abandon its enrichment program.

It’s important to keep in mind, of course, that currently these agreements — which Brookings’ Ken Pollack called “potentially quite significant” on MSNBC just now — are in principle only. As President Obama made clear in his appropriately cautious statement yesterday, it remains to be seen whether Iran will follow through. But we should also recognize that, as Juan Cole notes, Barack Obama “got more concessions from Iran in 7 1/2 hours than the former administration got in 8 years of saber-rattling.”

It will be interesting to see what new and wonderful conditions for success Joe Lieberman and the rest of the War Party come up with in the future to try and demonstrate that talks have already failed.

In a statement issued today, [Montazeri] said that Iran had become a “military regime” not the Islamic government envisioned at time of the 1979 revolution.

He said it was his fellow clergymen’s “religious duty” to speak out against the the government’s abuses.

“We didn’t want a mere change in title and slogans while the same oppressions and violations of rights continue under the cover of Islamic government,” he said in the statement posted to his website.

The extent of clerical condemnation of the regime’s behavior in the wake of the June presidential elections, which have seriously undermined the government’s claims to uphold just Islamic principles, has been one of the most interesting and important aspects of the protests. Back in July, I spoke with Hamid Dabashi, professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, who stressed how significant it was, both in religious and constitutional terms, that “leading clerics have taken sides with the Green movement.” Because of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s relatively meager scholarly credentials, Dabashi said, he “is not even in position to prevent [other clerics] from passing judgment.” “Khamenei’s official position as Supreme Leader has no bearing on his junior position as a jurist,” said Dabashi. “He’s not in a position to disallow the clerical challenge to his authority.”

A key challenge for the Obama administration as it moves forward with its Iran engagement policy is how to create the political space for Iranians to continue to contest the regime while at the same time addressing the more immediate problems of Iran’s nuclear program and support for terrorism.

One Iranian political figure has told a Western intermediary that the Obama administration may have unwittingly encouraged the regime’s power grab by sending two letters to Khamenei before the June election. The first, delivered through Iran’s mission to the United Nations, was a general invitation to dialogue. Khamenei is said to have taken a month to answer, and then only in vague terms. A second Obama administration letter reiterated U.S. interest in engagement. According to the Iranian political figure, this may have emboldened Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to think they had a free hand on June 12.

This suggests that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad felt that they did not have “a free hand” in Iran before President Obama sent letters and wished them a Happy Nowruz, which sounds pretty strange to me. The steady takeover of key Iranian state institutions by the hardline faction that supports Ahmadinejad, and is favored by Khamenei, had been occurring for over a decade. This faction was given a huge political boost by President Bush’s “war on terror” policies, which did a great job of confirming hardliners’ propaganda about belligerent U.S. intentions, weakening moderates and making talk of improved U.S.-Iran relations political poison.

An alternative interpretation, one that I’ve heard voiced by a number of analysts, both conservative and progressive, is that Obama’s outreach caused hardline elements in the regime to overplay their hand out of fear that victorious moderates would be able to deliver the U.S.-Iranian détente that a substantial portion of Iranians clearly desire.

According to Patrick Disney of the National Iranian American Council, Ignatius’ anecdote “has it completely backwards.”

Iran’s hardliners had a free hand when George Bush threatened them with military strikes at every turn. It was only when Obama came out with a sensible plan for engagement that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad actually felt threatened. The hardliners knew the majority of Iranians want détente with the US, and they recognized that Obama’s outreach would very likely reveal them — not the West — as the intractable actor.

Everyone knows that whoever delivers a rapprochement with the US will be seen as a hero by the Iranian people. But nothing scares Khamenei and Ahmadinejad more than the idea of a world without the US boogeyman to justify their every move. So they tried desperately to resist change — they cracked down on June 12 because they knew Obama could be a rallying point for moderates to get their foot in the door, and the hardliners just couldn’t accept that.

Examining their behavior over the past few years, it seems clear that Iran’s hardliners were far more “emboldened” by Bush’s supposed “toughness” than by anything President Obama has done in the nine months of his presidency. The hardliners rightly feared that they would be the losers in any warming of U.S.-Iran relations, which could explain the usually meticulous Khamenei’s uncharacteristic overreach, the comically obvious election-rigging, and the eventual security crackdown. Obama’s outreach only “emboldened” the hardliners in the sense that it elicited their over-reaction, resulting in the Islamic Republic’s most serious crisis of legitimacy since the revolution.

Up until now, the regime has been able to survive so long because of its relative flexibility. Khomeini continued the slaughter of the Iran-Iraq war for six years beyond the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Iran, but agreed to a UN cease-fire after becoming convinced the United States was about to intervene more directly after the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian airliner in 1988. He ruefully called his acceptance of the cease-fire resolution “more deadly than taking poison.” His successor, the current Supreme Leader Khamenei, allowed a reformist, Mohammad Khatami, to win the presidency twice, but undermined his efforts toward liberalizing Iranian society and politics whenever he and the conservative establishment could.

Apparently Khamenei couldn’t face the prospect of another reformer winning power, no matter how moderate and committed to the system, and decided to fix the election. But he didn’t count on hundreds of thousands of average Iranians wanting their votes to mean something and demonstrating in the streets of major cities to make sure they did. Even then, though, the regime could have showed flexibility and maintained the general contours of the system. After all, the main challenger, Mir Hussein Mousavi, has solid credentials as a member of that system, and the framed his objections to the rigged vote in the context of fidelity to the 1979 revolution’s ideals.

Mousavi’s framing and the recent bloody crackdown have probably done deep damage to the regime’s legitimacy. Khamenei prevented President Khatami from making any real changes to the Iranian system when he was in power from 1997 to 2005, and prevented Mousavi, a committed disciple of the revolution, from winning the presidency by the system’s own rules. And when Iranians then protested peacefully and framed their demands in accordance with the system, Khamenei denounced them and then sicced the state’s security forces on them. What the Supreme Leader and his allies have done is made peaceful change within the regime’s system impossible.

While I can’t read minds (I’m no Charles Xavier or Emma Frost), I think Roger Cohen hit the dynamic on the head in another recent column: “…the loss of trust by millions of Iranians who’d been prepared to tolerate a system they disliked, provided they had a small margin of freedom, constitutes the core political earthquake in Iran. Moderates who once worked the angles are now muttering about making Molotov cocktails.”

These two Irans – the vibrant, diverse coalition that voted for change and then demonstrated in the streets versus the authoritarian, rule-by-force regime – will remain in conflict no matter if the government manages to disperse street protests in the short run. Khamenei and his successor(s) may be able to hold onto power by force for years, but they must do so now knowing large swaths of the population find their rule illegitimate and their system discredited. As Cohen wrote earlier, “Whatever happens now, all is changed in Iran.” We can only hope that the change is positive for the Iranian people, and that it comes sooner rather than later.

In an especially good post, Spencer Ackerman flagged a key passage from Moussavi’s statement:

If the large volume of cheating and vote rigging, which has set fire to the hays of people’s anger, is expressed as the evidence of fairness, the republican nature of the state will be killed and in practice, the ideology that Islam and Republicanism are incompatible will be proven.

This outcome will make two groups happy: One, those who since the beginning of revolution stood against Imam and called the Islamic state a dictatorship of the elite who want to take people to heaven by force; and the other, those who in defending the human rights, consider religion and Islam against republicanism.

As Spencer notes, that last bit is a pretty clear rebuke to those Western critics who, in criticizing the brutality of the Iranian regime, have tried to present Islam and democracy as irreconcilable.

Speaking of which, conservative scholar-activist Martin Kramer, in a comically mendacious (and, as usual, Rashid Khalidi-obsessed) dispatch, tries to argue that the “events in Iran have left Obama’s simplistic mental map of the Middle East, first learned from a few Palestinian activists and an old Hyde Park rabbi, in shreds.”

But, in fact, what is in shreds is the representation of Islamism — peddled for years by Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and ideologically affiliated think tanks and publications — as wholly and irretrievably hostile to modernity, to human rights, and to democracy. Having spent years vilifying the Islamist discourse of struggle and sacrifice as deployed by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, these pundits have now been pantsed by the Iranian demonstrators deploying the very same discourse on behalf of freedom and reform. Moussavi has declared himself “ready for martyrdom” — will conservatives now condemn his “death cult“?

The point here is not to call out those whose skewed analysis of the Middle East strongly informed America’s disastrous and costly attempt to implant democracy there by force. Okay, that’s part of the point. But the larger part is to note how significant it is that the Iranian clerical-dictatorial regime is being challenged from within Islam, and that a very credible scholarly-religious critique that has long been suppressed by the regime now seems to have found a vehicle in Moussavi and the movement around him.

Even in the best outcome, I think it’s likely that the Iranian government will continue to be, in key respects, Islamist-controlled (matching the Islamist-controlled government in neighboring Iraq.) But it’s important to understand that this, much more so than any Western-imported concept of “secularism,” has the potential to really spur the already vigorous debate in the region over the arrangement of a fair and just society, by underscoring Islamism’s contribution to that debate. As with President Obama’s wise caution in regard to the demonstrations, the most productive thing the U.S. do, while continuing to voice support for human rights, is to get out of the way and make space for the debate to occur.

Montazeri issued a statement today strongly supporting political and religious pluralism, and cautioning both the regime and the demonstrators against violence:

The distinction of a powerful government — Islamic or non-Islamic — is its ability to heed both similar and opposing views and, with religious compassion, which is a prerequisite of government, allow all the strata of society, whatever their political beliefs, to participate in the running of the country, instead of totally alienating them and constantly increasing their [the dissidents] number. Since this government is known as a religious government, I fear that the conduct and actions of the officials may ultimately harm the religion and undermine the people’s beliefs. [...]

I urge all the people, in particular the youth, to pursue the realization of their rights with patience and grace, to maintain calm and security in the country by virtue of sagacity and intelligence, and to refrain from aggression or any action that may harm their image and legitimate demand, and which would give an excuse to those of unfit character, who infiltrate the crowds, to create turmoil and disorder, and set people’s homes and belongings on fire, in a bid to generate an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. [...]

I advise all the officials, as well as the military and security forces, to uphold their religion and not sell their souls; they must understand that the term “officials are excused [because they are only doing their duty]” would not be accepted by the Almighty God on the Day of Judgement. They must regard the protesting youth as their own children, and refrain from violent and cruel actions. They must learn from the mistakes of the predecessors and understand that, eventually, those who oppress the people will receive their just comeuppance. In this day and age, one cannot hide the truth from the people through censorship, closures and restrictions of communication means.

In conclusion, I beseech the Almighty God to grant success to all those who serve Islam and the Muslims, and honor and glory to the dear Iranian nation.

Unlike allegations of vote fraud from American congressmen and former presidential candidates, this is the sort of statement, a respected clerical authority making an appeal for justice, tolerance, and non-violence on the basis of Islam, that could has the potential to really change the outcome on the ground. Hopefully more clerics will join with him.

For example, check Daniel Pipes’s new line. Back in 2006, Pipes ominously warned of “The Mystical Menace of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad“:

[T]he most dangerous leaders in modern history are those (such as Hitler) equipped with a totalitarian ideology and a mystical belief in their own mission. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fulfills both these criteria.

Last week, however, speaking at a Heritage Foundation event, Pipes stated that “the president of Iran, despite his title, is not the final arbiter in [national security] matters.”

The president tends to have power in the areas — in the soft areas — having to do with culture and religion and education. And it is the Rahbare, the Supreme Guide of Iran, Khomeini at first and now Khamenei who has control of the military, the law enforcement, the judiciary system, the intelligence agencies. So its not clear that the president matters that much.

As Daniel Luban reported, Pipes was at least forthright enough to admit that, were he a registered voter in Iran, he would “vote for Ahmadinejad…I would prefer to have an enemy who is forthright and blatant and obvious.” Interestingly, Pipes’ thinking neatly mirrors the thinking of extremists elsewhere, such as the contributor to an Al Qaeda-linked website who declared that “Al-Qaeda will have to support [Sen. John] McCain in the coming election,” as McCain would be more likely to continue the policies of George W. Bush, which produced a propaganda and recruiting bonanza for the terrorists.

Pipes also flatly insisted that “when it comes to building a nuclear weapon…there is a wide consensus in the Iranian leadership that building these weapons is something that is desirableand there is no known dissent from that viewpoint .”

This is untrue. There is in fact rather well known dissent from that viewpoint — in the form of a 2003 fatwa (religious-legal decree) issued by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei which declared that Islam forbids the development and use of all weapons of mass destruction. It’s true that later statements and actions have called this position into question, but it’s flatly false to suggest that there is “no dissent” among the Iranian clerical leadership regarding the production and use of nuclear weapons.

Interestingly, the event at which Pipes spoke was called “New Thinking for Old Problems.” The old problem, I take it, being “how to gin up a war with Iran,” and the new thinking being “insist that a reformist electoral victory will be meaningless.” Of course, if Ahmadinejad wins, he’ll still be the new Hitler and the presidency will once again matter a lot.

Tomorrow, Iranians will go to the polls to choose their next president. This election (and the possible run-off) will be far from free and fair – who can and cannot run for president is determined by the Guardian Council, the unelected theocratic body that approves all candidates for elected office. Despite this circumscribed choice, Iranians do have options in these elections.

Current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, well-known as a radical conservative to the outside world for his inflammatory rhetoric, faces the internal opposition of reformists and pragmatic conservatives in his quest for a second term. These groups believe Ahmadinejad’s outlandish behavior on the international stage and economic mismanagement are driving Iran to ruin. They include people like former president and 2005 Ahmadinejad opponent Hashemi Rafsanjani, who recently accused Ahmadinejad of lying about his [Rafsanjani’s] public service record in a letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ahmadinejad faces three challengers, two relative reformists and one moderate conservative. Of these, the challenger perceived to have the greatest support is the moderate reformist Mir Hussein Mousavi. A former conservative and prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war, Mousavi has cultivated the support of students and women. In a recent televised debate, Mousavi accused Ahmadinejad’s foreign policy of “adventurism, illusionism, exhibitionism, extremism, and superficiality.” Other opponents include Mehdi Karroubi, another reformist who promises to appoint a female minister if elected, and Mohsen Rezai, a pragmatic conservative and former Revolutionary Guard head who warns Ahmadinejad is leading the country to a “precipice.”

The biggest issue facing Iranian voters, like those in much of the rest of the world, is the economy. Ahmadinejad’s economic policies have bought him the political goodwill of the rural poor at the cost of rampant inflation – 23.6 percent according to Iran’s own central bank. The IMF estimates that Iran’s economic growth has slowed from 8 percent in 2007 to 4.5 percent in 2008, and projects that it will further decrease to 3.2 percent this year. All three alternatives are promising to end the current president’s economic mismanagement and take a less confrontational approach to foreign affairs.

But will it really matter who wins? As Laura Secor observes in The New Republic, all four presidential candidates are playing on essentially the same rural, conservative political terrain. Urban Iranians with more liberal attitudes “are so disenchanted with the Islamic Republic that they are as a whole increasingly disinclined to vote.” And even if one of the alternatives to Ahmadinejad wins in the end, he will not be the most powerful person in Iran’s convoluted political system. That honor goes to the Supreme Leader, to whom all roads of political power ultimately run in the Islamic Republic.

To be sure, an Ahmadinejad defeat would be a good thing. Replacing an ideological blowhard with a more pragmatic or even reformist figure will certainly make it politically easier for the United States and Iran to engage one another after 30 some years of estrangement. But the United States can’t bank its Iran policy on who occupies an office with powers that ebb and flow on the whim of an unelected senior cleric. We must deal with the byzantine Iranian political structure as it is, not place unfounded hope in individual changes in positions with fluctuating status and power.

[Al-Hayat]: If you want to describe George Bush, then how would you describe him?

[Chalabi]: A man with very little skill and knowledge.

[Al-Hayat]: He did Iran a great service by toppling Saddam?

[Chalabi]: Iran benefited from toppling Saddam. Bush didn’t mean to do it a favor but it was clear that Iran would benefit from Saddam’s fall. I am convinced that Saddam would not have fallen except for an implicit agreement between America and Iran.

[Al-Hayat]: This happened?

[Chalabi]: Yes, of course it did.

[Al-Hayat]: Through whom?

[Chalabi]: We worked on this and so did the Supreme Council and Jalal Talbani.

The idea that Iran has been the main beneficiary of the Iraq war isn’t particularly controversial any more — except, of course, among the war’s neoconservative advocates, who continue to insist that removing Iran’s greatest enemy and empowering Iraqi factions with longstanding close ties to Iran was a huge defeat for Iran. Incidentally, many of these people — Sen. John McCain and his adviser Randy Scheunemann among them — were also Chalabi’s biggest boosters.

Like Ricks, I’d be very interested to hear more about the “implicit agreement” that Chalabi asserts between the U.S. and Iran. Given what’s known now about Chalabi’s cooperation with Iran’s intelligence services, though, it’s pretty chilling to consider how close some of Chalabi’s marks came to taking the White House last November. Unfortunately, as shown by the continuing prominence of McCain, Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and other neocon fantasists, inadvertently aiding America’s enemies is no barrier to influence in American foreign policy, as long as one is always careful to err on the side of war, and meticulous about dressing one’s belligerent strategic stupidity in patriotic drag.

The second is that the Obama administration has understood the extent to which the Bush-Cheney approach to Iran — in which talking to one’s enemies was itself seen as a form of appeasement — essentially gave a free pass to the Iranian regime. As John Lee Anderson writes in the New Yorker, “it was easy for [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to argue that President Bush was not interested in anything but a hostile relationship with Iran.”

Obama’s [Nowruz] message was “a game-changer,” Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “Now the U.S. has come out with an extraordinarily different kind of message, one that is warm, and seems sincere about engaging with Iran. So the Iranians now will ask of their government, why aren’t you engaging?” Nasr added, “Obama has cleverly created a debate between the Iranian people and their leaders, and within the leadership itself — and also, because this comes just three months before the elections, made it a campaign issue.”

As CAP analyst Andrew Grotto wrote last May, moving toward greater engagement with the Iranian government “would clarify the choice being presented to the Iranian nation by the international community: the poverty and isolation that extremism brings, or the prosperity and global respect that Iran would enjoy if it adopted a more constructive foreign policy.” Iran’s conservatives would very much prefer that that choice not be clarified.

The Bush administration’s approach to Iran — typified by Dick Cheney’s ideologically hidebound insistence that “we don’t negotiate with evil, we defeat it” — was not only a propaganda gift to Iran’s conservative hardliners, it both confirmed and mirrored their own worldview. By steadily reorienting the U.S. approach to Iran and making it abundantly clear both to the Iranian people and the world that America is not the recalcitrant party, President Obama is putting the onus on Iran’s hardliners to justify their own intransigence. He’s also taking away one of President Ahmadinejad’s most treasured propaganda tools — fear of an aggressive, threatening America — months before Iranians go to the polls to choose a new president.

To give up this trump card–the non-relationship with the United States, the easy evocation of an external bogeyman–would be costly for the Iranian leadership. It would be a Gorbachevian signal that the revolution is entering a dramatically new phase–one Iran’s leaders cannot be certain of surviving in power.

The Bush administration got this dynamic all wrong when it insisted that Iran meet preconditions before coming to the negotiating table. The working assumption was that the lure of talks with the United States would be powerful enough to impel the Iranians to make a major concession. But what if talking to the United States is itself a concession — perhaps one of the toughest for the Iranians to make? That puts us in the very different, far less advantageous position of needing to offer Iran something it truly wants–like a security guarantee–up front. That’s appeasement, critics might object: How can we give up our trump card right at the outset? It looks bad if you think of it as unilateral disarmament. It looks less bad if you consider that the very act of entering direct talks with us means something for the Iranian regime that it doesn’t mean for us.

This is an important re-framing of the “more ideological than pragmatic?” debate that Secor notes has tended to dominate the U.S. debate over Iran policy. Like Secor, I think the evidence weighs strongly against the idea that Iran is interested in committing suicide, but there’s still a question of whether the very act of formally negotiating with the United States — and thus abandoning a central pillar of state ideology, anti-Americanism — could itself represent an unacceptable form of “regime change” for Khamenei.

In the end, Obama’s Iran outreach may simply not work, but it could effectively demonstrate to the Iranian people and others that the Great Satan is not the recalcitrant party. As newly-minted administration ally Robert Kagan wrote the other day, what’s the harm in trying?

I won’t go too much into Chapin’s reasoning here, except to say that he thinks Ahmadinejad runs Iran, he thinks Russia intends to foment nuclear apocalypse in the Middle East to drive up oil prices, and he fears a Iranian electro-magnetic pulse attack on America that Iran has shown no capacity to deliver. And:

For those that wonder why Iran would invite its own obliteration by attacking the United Sates, understand that the apocalyptic, messianically driven mentality of their leadership views martyrdom as a reward and not a deterrent.

This claim, a common trope of the conservative discourse on Iran, is the rhetorical equivalent of putting on a red clown nose and rainbow afro wig. There are no actual Iran scholars that I’m aware of who find the “suicidal Iran” thesis to be credible. The Iranian regime has had numerous opportunities to commit suicide over the past decades, but has repeatedly behaved according to a rational strategic calculation of its interests.

So Roger Chapin doesn’t know much about Iran. He does, however, apparently know a lot about founding veterans charities and then scamming those charities for lots of money. An investigation last year found that Chapin’s charities — which include the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes and Help Hospitalized Veterans — “raised more than $168 million from 2004 to 2006, but spent only a pittance — about 25 percent — to help veterans.”

The rest, nearly $125 million, went to fund-raising, administrative expenses, fat salaries and perks. Mr. Chapin gave himself and his wife $1.5 million in salary, bonuses and pension contributions over those three years, including more than $560,000 in 2006. The charities also reimbursed the Chapins more than $340,000 for meals, hotels, entertainment and other expenses, and paid for a $440,000 condominium and a $17,000 golf-club membership.

Chapin’s bio in the Washington Times op-ed states that he is the “founder and president of Make America Safe, a new San Diego-based policy and educational organization focused on the threat posed by radical Islamics [sic] to U.S. national security.” We’ll wait and see how many new condos, steak dinners and golf-club memberships making America safe requires.

American and European officials say Mr. Khamenei is the only Iranian leader who can make the ultimate decision to suspend or freeze Iran’s nuclear program.

“The key issue is now to find a channel to Khamenei,” said a senior Western diplomat briefed on the Obama administration’s policy review in recent days. “If the supreme leader moves, he’s going to do it in a very prudent and incremental way.”

The discussions are part of a larger Iran-policy review that the Obama administration is aiming to complete this month, according to U.S. officials. [...]

The Obama administration’s first direct contact with Iranian officials is expected to come later this month at a U.N.-sanctioned conference on Afghanistan in the Netherlands. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other U.S. officials say Washington and Tehran could collaborate in countering the Afghan narcotics trade and weakening the Taliban.

Interestingly, the story notes a “growing consensus is that the U.S. should seek to begin a dialogue with Iran before June elections there, despite concerns that such recognition could strengthen the position of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” Back in November, the Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour advised U.S. policymakers to “refrain from making any grand overtures to Tehran that could redeem Ahmadinejad’s leadership and increase his popularity ahead of the country’s June 2009 presidential elections.” I’m not sure that seeking a channel to the supreme leader necessarily qualifies as a “grand overture,” though, as much as a simple acknowledgment of who the decider is.

In any case, now would be a great time for everyone to go and read Sadjadpour’s excellent review of Khamenei’s writings and speeches, which Sadjadpour suggests “present arguably the most accurate reflection of Iranian domestic and foreign policy aims and actions over the last two decades.”

First, I should say — and I think it was obvious — that I wasn’t making a broad comparison between the Soviet Union and Iran, but rather making a specific comment about the difficulty of drawing conclusions about trends within two often frustratingly opaque regimes.

Sullivan suggests that “it’s false to argue that the [Iranian] presidency is without clout or efficacy,” noting that “Iranian presidents — like Rafsanjani in the late 1980s, and Khatami in the late 1990s — have challenged the Leader on matters of economic isolation, domestic security and the freedoms of Iranian citizens.”

That’s true, but the key thing here is this: They lost. I don’t argue that the presidency is “without clout or efficacy” (though, as Akhbar Ganji pointed out in the piece I quoted, Khatami himself protested that the presidency had been reduced to a factotum) but the presidency operates within a structure that is dominated by the supreme leader’s office.

Sullivan writes that to “focus narrowly on Khamenei and the Royal [sic] Guard, would put us in the same place we were in the 1970s: out of touch with the situation on the ground, and disconnected from the concerns of ordinary Iranians. These decisions, as President Carter learned in 1979, have an impact on foreign policy.”

This is a little odd. We were out of touch with the situation on the ground in Iran in the 1970s mainly because we were the deeply committed sponsor of an oppressive Iranian regime that represented the crux of U.S. regional security strategy. That regime was overthrown, then they kicked us out. It’s a rather different situation now. I certainly don’t think that Iranian popular discontent should be disregarded, but we’ve been hearing these sorts of arguments about the restive Iranian population for years, and while I have no reason to believe that they aren’t true, Khamenei and his allies have consistently proven expert at deflecting calls for reform and preserving their regime, the main levers of which remain firmly in Khamenei’s hands.

A couple of stories out of Iran provide good opportunity to argue against a similar sort of approach — call it Tehran-ology — that tries to determine an approach toward Iran based upon perceived political trends among Iranian elites.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported that one of former Iranian president — and current presidential candidate — Mohamed Khatami’s most prominent backers, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, switched to support one of Khatami’s rivals, Mehdi Kharroubi. Both candidates are considered reformers, and have been critical of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Today the Washington Post reports that another critic of Ahamedinejad, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi has also announced his candidacy. But while it’s fair to see all of this as evidence of popular discontent with Ahmadinejad’s poor stewardship of the economy, as always it’s unclear what, if anything, any of this says about Iranian supreme leader Khamenei’s orientation toward rapprochement with the U.S., which is the key consideration.

On that point, Iranian dissident Akhbar Ganji had this article in the Nov/Dec issue of Foreign Affairs, it’s one of the best and most concise descriptions of the structure of the Iranian government that you’ll find. The bottom line: Regardless of which leaders and factions are up or down at any given moment, Ayatollah Khamenei is always up.

The Iranian constitution endows the supreme leader with tremendous authority over all major state institutions, and Khamenei, who has held the post since 1989, has found many other ways to further increase his influence. Formally or not, the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government all operate under the absolute sovereignty of the supreme leader; Khamenei is the head of state, the commander in chief, and the top ideologue. He also reaches into economic, religious, and cultural affairs through various government councils and organs of repression, such as the Revolutionary Guards, whose commander he himself appoints.

Of all of Iran’s leaders since the country became the Islamic Republic in 1979, only Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution’s leader; Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran’s president for much of the 1990s; and Khamenei have had defining influences. Despite all the attention he receives, Ahmadinejad does not even rank among Iran’s top 100 leaders over the past 30 years. Khamenei supports Ahmadinejad immeasurably more than he did any of Ahmadinejad’s predecessors, but Ahmadinejad is only as powerful as he is devoted to Khamenei and successful at advancing his aims. Khamenei’s power is so great, in fact, that in 2004 the reformist Muhammad Khatami declared that the post of president, which he held at the time, had been reduced to a factotum. Blaming the country’s main problems on Ahmadinejad not only overstates his influence; it inaccurately suggests that Iran’s problems will go away when he does. More likely, especially regarding matters such as Iran’s foreign policy, the situation will remain much the same as long as the structure of power that supports the supreme leader remains unchanged.

While inviting Iran to the upcoming conference on Afghanistan seems like a prudent move — engaging Iran first on a key area of mutual concern rather than going after the big issues outright — it’s important to remember that Khamenei is the main arbiter of Iran’s foreign policy. Regardless of who is favored at the moment or what trends are extant, as Karim Sadjadpour told Middle East Progress last month, any approach “that aims to ignore, bypass or undermine Khamenei is guaranteed to fail.”

But rather than spend valuable time demonstrating why the report’s research method makes “guilt by association” seem like a comparatively rigorous argumentative framework, I’ll just quote from the report’s conclusion (pg 25), which lists some of the people the report claims “have been associated in one way or another with the Iran Lobby”:

• Fletcher School professor and Middle East scholar, Dr. Vali Nasr, who will, as noted above, be Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s senior advisor – a position that will assuredly involve decisions about dealings with Afghanistan’s neighbor.

• Dr. Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s new Ambassador to the United Nations. Amb. Rice served on the board of directors for the Center for a New American Security. While CNAS is not formally connected directly with either NIAC or Trita Parsi, the foreign policy positions of its affiliates correspond strongly to the preferred policy positions of Tehran’s mullahs.

• Ambassador Dennis Ross, who will be a senior advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for Iran policy, was previously an “Expert” for CNAS.

• Council on Foreign Relations Committee president and another CNAS “Expert” Richard Haas, reportedly is under consideration for a top job in the Obama foreign policy team.

Do you oppose air strikes on Iran? So do Tehran’s mullahs! Congratulations, you are now part of the Iran Lobby. But really, if the neocons ever intend to be taken seriously again, they need to get some of these characters in check.

In his news conference this week, President Obama went so far as to describe Iran’s “development of a nuclear weapon” before correcting himself to refer to its “pursuit” of weapons capability.

Obama’s nominee to serve as CIA director, Leon E. Panetta, left little doubt about his view last week when he testified on Capitol Hill. “From all the information I’ve seen,” Panetta said, “I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability.”

The language reflects the extent to which senior U.S. officials now discount a National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 2007 that was instrumental in derailing U.S. and European efforts to pressure Iran to shut down its nuclear program.

Not so much, actually. Delivering the intelligence community’s annual threat assessment (pdf) yesterday, director of national intelligence Dennis Blair “said US intelligence assesses that Iran has not restarted nuclear weapons design and weaponization work that it halted in late 2003.”

“Although we do not know whether Iran currently intends to develop nuclear weapons, we assess Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop them,” he said in an annual threat assessment to Congress.

The assessment essentially reaffirmed a 2007 intelligence report that at the time was widely seen as a setback to international efforts to put pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear program.

The 2007 NIE (pdf) has been the source of much controversy, but here’s what it actually said:

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program (1); we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons. We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.

1. For the purposes of this Estimate, by “nuclear weapons program” we mean Iran’s nuclear weapon design and weaponization work and covert uranium conversion-related and uranium enrichment-related work; we do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.

While it’s important not to underplay Iran’s problematic behavior here — the step from “civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment” to weaponization is a relatively small one — the distinction between “nuclear weapon” and “nuclear weapons capability” is not trivial. It’s clear that Iran would like the capability, but it’s also clear by looking at Iran’s behavior that the regime understands that actually building a weapon would trigger a number of highly undesirable consequences.

We should also remember that the main reason that the 2007 NIE made such a splash was because President Bush and other administration officials had, in the previous months, been engaged in a troublingly familiar threat-hyping exercise. Just as he had done in the lead-up to the Iraq war, President Bush represented “no doubt” about Iran’s intention to possess a nuclear weapon. The 2007 NIE showed that there was, in fact, some doubt, an assessment which remains operative today — the LA Times’ attempt to generate traffic notwithstanding.

According to medieval Shiite texts, a message announcing the Mahdi’s return will be carried to the four corners of the world so that none will be able to say he did not know that the Last Days were soon to arrive.

Eerily, the rocket that carried the telecommunications satellite into space was named “Safir” (message) and the satellite itself “Omid” (hope). In short order we can expect to hear Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announcing the imminent return of the Mahdi. He has already described the launch as a “holy event.” These believers see the launch of Omid as the fulfillment of the Mahdi prophecy.

It’s true that many Iranian leaders, including President Ahmadinejad, believe in the return of the Hidden Imam and the Last Days (many American leaders believe similar things about Jesus Christ.) It’s also true that Ahmadinejad, a pious conservative Muslim, lards his speeches with references to the Hidden Imam, so much so that he was chastised last year by several Iranian scholars, who told him he “would be better off concentrating on Iran’s social problems…than indulging in such mystical rhetoric.” There is no evidence, however, that Iranian policy is guided by a strategy to hasten the Imam’s return. Iran’s actual policy choices over the last three decades indicate rational strategic calculations.

According to Mehdi Khalaji, an Iran analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who spent years studying Shia theology in the Iranian seminary city of Qom, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei — who, not Ahmadinejad, actually controls Iranian foreign policy — is much more concerned with the here and now:

Not one of [Khamenei's] speeches refers to any apocalyptic sign or reveals any special eagerness for the return of the Hidden Imam. As the theory of the guardianship of the jurist requires, the most significant task of the Supreme Leader is to safeguard the regime, even by overruling Islamic law. Therefore, it seems like Khamenei, unlike the Iranian president, does not welcome and military confrontation with the West, the United States, or Israel.

Preservation of the Islamic Republic, not some crazy desire to trigger the apocalypse, is what guides Iranian policy. This is not to defend the regime’s oppression of its people or its support for extremism. Iran certainly behaves in troubling ways, but in order to develop a U.S. policy that can effectively change that behavior, it’s important to understand what Iran’s actual goals are, and here Ledeen is no help. He is utterly committed to his vision of Iran as irrational, undeterable, and, in regard to international terrorism, omnipotent. Just as his fellow neocon eccentric Laurie Mylroie saw Saddam Hussein behind every act of anti-American terrorism from 1991 onward, so Ledeen perceives an Iranian finger on every Middle East trigger. Back in 2006, Ledeen went so far as to claim that Iran “now exercises effective control over” al Qaeda.

Personal anecdote: Last spring I was on a press call with an Army colonel to discuss Iranian support for Shia militias in Iraq. Ledeen was also on the call, he kept pestering the colonel to talk about “Iranian support for Al Qaeda in Iraq. I want to know about Iranian support for Al Qaeda in Iraq,” he said. The exasperated colonel had to keep telling Ledeen that there was no real evidence of Iranian support for Al Qaeda. Undeterred by that, or by the fact that both General David Petraeus and General Raymond Odierno statements that there is “no evidence” of Iranian support for Al Qaeda in Iraq, in yesterday’s WSJ piece Ledeen simply asserted “Iran’s considerable support for al Qaeda in Iraq.”

This is crackpot stuff. It’s pretty amazing that, while even the American Enterprise Institute now considers Ledeen’s views too marginal, the Wall Street Journal doesn’t mind airing them.