Here is the one immutable fact of Barack Obama's foreign policy agenda as it relates to Iran: It's over. The rule book he came in with is as irrelevant as a tourist guide to the Austro-Hungarian empire.
If the forces of reform and democracy win, Obama's plan to negotiate with the regime is moot, for the regime will be gone. And if the forces of reform are crushed into submission by the regime, Obama's plan is moot, because the regime will still be there.
If Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei come out on top, even the most soulless realists will be repulsed by the blood on the regime's collective hands. Politics and decency will demand that the world condemn or shun the regime.
Before June 12, Obama's eagerness to negotiate with Ahmadinejad -- ridiculed by his conservative critics -- was hailed by the establishment and the left as proof of his high-minded faith in diplomacy, a healthy antidote to George W. Bush's allegedly close-minded approach.
But now, if the clerical junta prevails, anyone who shakes hands with Ahmadinejad will have a hard time washing the blood off his own hands.
What is dismaying is how reluctant the administration is to accept this. As even some of Obama's most stalwart defenders are admitting, the president was caught flat-footed by the events in Iran. There's no shame in that; everyone was surprised.
His most ardent defenders might claim that he's been adept at "calibrating" his response all along, but it's obvious that he's been playing catch-up. His initial instinct, according to Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post, was to cling "to the pre-election paramount goal of keeping alive the chances for a nuclear deal with any government in Tehran." To that end, Obama said there was little difference between Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Ahmadinejad, and he refrained from "meddling." Within a week, he gave a full-throated denunciation of the regime's clampdown and a statement of support for the protesters. But he only did so after the Europeans and our own Congress.
Why is it so hard for Obama to get a handle on the Iranian challenge? Hoagland and others are surely partly right that the president is determined to negotiate with Iran. But Obama has made it clear that he sees the elimination of Iran's nuclear problem not as a stand-alone priority but as one part of his Middle East two-step. His inseparable goal is to also push Israel into a peace settlement with the Palestinians. As an unnamed Iran expert in contact with White House officials told Foreign Policy's Laura Rozen, "Obama is dedicated to diplomacy in a manner that is almost ideological. ... He wants to do some stuff in the Middle East over the next eight years. He may not be able to achieve half of them unless he gets this huge piece of the puzzle [Iran] right."
