I posted a comment on another Iran piece by Michael Totten at Commentary Contentions:

Another good ploy is to make clear that Western governments will do everything possible to expose the names of individuals in the regime suspected of ordering or encouraging acts of brutality against unarmed citizens, and to help bring them to justice later. Lots of scope for that via the Web now.

That can be reinforced by sending personal secret messages to suspected regime ‘moderates’ urging them not to stick with a leadership driving its own country towards civil war and disaster.

Fear of the long arm of Justice and an unwillingness to go down with a sinking ship may help encourage weaker members in the regime to hold back, which in turn exposes the most vicious leaders as desperate losers.

In a word: wedge-driving, to prize moderate extremists away from extreme extremists!

No guarantee of success. But it all helps shift the odds of better outcomes a little in the right direction…

Which prompts an eagle-eyed reader’s question. Is this adequate?

Any popular movement that seeks to unseat a thuggish government must be able to do at least 2 things:

a) defeat or co-opt the local security forces.
b) defeat or co-opt the army.

It’s not clear to me that Iranian opposition elements are capable of even clearing the first hurdle, much less the second.  I don’t see any sign that the Iranian theocracy has unleashed their Revolutionary Guard who are, by all accounts a thoroughly nasty gang of brain-washed thugs who will have no compunction about slaughtering people by the thousands.  That suggests to me that the regime simply doesn’t feel that threatened.

Covertly supporting the opposition with funding, communications equipment, and offering vocal support will no doubt help.  But one wonders whether anything more can be done, especially when we are talking about the very serious possibility of something like the Tiananmen Square massacre.  The bottom line here is that Iran is not China.  So perhaps a threat of the use of force to attack the regime’s forces if they resort to violence can be helpful?

He of course is right. It is not ‘adequate’. But if the analysis is correct (ie that the regime is sufficiently ruthless not to feel threatened), no policy response will make much difference unless it creats New Facts on the Ground. See eg a sudden one-off attack to flatten all key regime power-base installations (eg Revolutionary Guards HQ, command and control facilities, weapons sites and so on) to change the balance of power in favour of citizens. That would create a rather more level killing field – not always a popular thing to do.

Merely threatening to do that will not cut the ice, as Iranians on all sides will not believe the threat now (Note: as, for better or worse, they might have done had President Bush been President?).

Plus such a threat would spoil the New Narrative before it gets out of the driveway. That all that US cowboy stuff of the recent past has to give way now to open hands and dialogue. Although as some comentators too liberal/left even for Obama gloomily believe, sooner or later that America inevitably will rear its ugly militaristic head again even with President Obama in charge.

Today’s Guardian has some brilliant analysis by Jonathan Freedland. So brilliant that it is incomprehensible:

This dramatic June weekend has set a test of the American president’s resolve. Will he stick to his course, continuing to reach out to Iran even as he shows tough love to Israel? He should, partly to show that his policy was always about long-term strategy rather than short-term tactics. But also because the last 48 hours offer plenty of evidence that he’s getting it right.

If you say so.

Let’s keep an eye on the very basics. It is a mistake to treat this so-called election in Iran episode as anything like a normal election, even though it has had the effect of freeing up a lot of latent popular hostility to the Iran regime. Who better to lay it on the line than Christopher Hitchens:

Iran and its citizens are considered by the Shiite theocracy to be the private property of the anointed mullahs. This totalitarian idea was originally based on a piece of religious quackery promulgated by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and known as velayat-e faqui.

Under the terms of this edict—which originally placed the clerics in charge of the lives and property of orphans, the indigent, and the insane—the entire population is now declared to be a childlike ward of the black-robed state. Thus any voting exercise is, by definition, over before it has begun, because the all-powerful Islamic Guardian Council determines well in advance who may or may not "run."

Any newspaper referring to the subsequent proceedings as an election, sometimes complete with rallies, polls, counts, and all the rest of it, is the cause of helpless laughter among the ayatollahs. ("They fell for it? But it’s too easy!")

Shame on all those media outlets that have been complicit in this dirty lie all last week. And shame also on our pathetic secretary of state, who said that she hoped that "the genuine will and desire" of the people of Iran would be reflected in the outcome. Surely she knows that any such contingency was deliberately forestalled to begin with.

This has to be right. He ends with a bang:

Mention of the Lebanese elections impels me to pass on what I saw with my own eyes at a recent Hezbollah rally in south Beirut, Lebanon. In a large hall that featured the official attendance of a delegation from the Iranian Embassy, the most luridly displayed poster of the pro-Iranian party was a nuclear mushroom cloud! Underneath this telling symbol was a caption warning the "Zionists" of what lay in store…

…This means, among other things, that the vicious manipulation by which the mullahs control Iran can no longer be considered their "internal affair."

Fascism at home sooner or later means fascism abroad. Face it now or fight it later. Meanwhile, give it its right name.

Or maybe don’t face it or fight it, now or later.

Let it prevail by blowing up Israel then urgently call a series of UN and EU meetings to express grave concern but also to offer it the open hand of friendship?

Then hope it has run out of steam, mission accomplished?