Mark Steyn picks up my earlier piece on Iran but is disinclined to offer the Obama Administration the benefit of any doubt:

Our concerns are largely irrelevant: Obama? They don’t care about his speeches. The nukes? They’ll happen regardless, with wide support. This election was stolen for reasons of internal survival and long-term regional strategy by a regime confident enough to snub not just a US government promoting impotence as moral virtue but those allies in Europe who regularly jet in to offer cooing paeans to the vibracy of Iranian democracy.

So I doubt we’ll see a Kostunica scenario play out. Indeed, given Iran’s collapsed demographics and other structural defects, we seem on the brink not of popular revolution but of a malign mutation of the Islamic republic into something even more virulent and destabilizing.

Not, I agree, implausible.

Whatever we do, we must not take sides:

"I thought that President Obama chose his words very carefully and very appropriately last night and I spoke to Mrs (Hillary) Clinton, the Secretary of State, and we are all determined not to fall into the trap of being seen to back one side or the other," Mr Miliband said.

"This is not a pro-West versus an anti-West competition in Iran, it is a competition to reflect the will of the Iranian people and I think that we have to hold fast to that point."

Offering help to the protesters would be counter-productive, he said.

"The long thesis of the conspiracy of foreign powers against Iran is one that is deeply ingrained in the popular imagination and peddled vociferously by the regime.

"What is very, very important is that we continue to show respect for the Iranian people – that’s what President Obama did yesterday – that we continue to insist that it is for them to choose their government."

But if the regime (as Mr Miliband himself describes it) denies the Iranian people the right to choose their government (sic), why is it obviously counter-productive to offer help to the protesters? What are the Iranian people meant to do? Why should they respond peacefully when so much violence is being used to oppress them?

I can understand and might even agree with a neutral line as between the key participants as people. Mr Miliband fairly points out that it is not right to categorise the rivals in Iran by our own standards.

But the question is, does that line have to be explicitly or implicitly neutral and more or less content-free?

Can’t at least some content be added to show that while we are not on one political side as opposed to another, we do support some very basic principles – and that the current regime in Iran has massively and persistently breached those principles (specific examples), brutalising countless Iranians themselves?

If we aren’t careful, we’ll end up prissily, non-judgmentally ‘not taking sides’ between Freedom and Tyranny or between Truth and Lies.

And if you say you don’t take sides between those things, you’re in fact taking sides.

In favour of Lies and Tyranny.