The mullahs aren’t going to go for it anyway. They need big-time scapegoats to explain big-time repression. We can expect the mullahs to blame the US and Israel for this crisis, hoping to leverage anti-American and ati-Semitic fervor to get them off the hook for their brutality against their own people. They will paint Mousavi and his allies as puppets of the CIA and Mossad, if they haven’t already started. While they do that — and it would take years to make that stick this time — they’re not going to have tea with Obama, Hillary Clinton, or anyone else from the US.
It's interesting that the totalitarian regime has the exact same talking points as the leftists that way "Obama can't speak out!". Make of that what you will.
But let’s say, for argument, that the mullahs suddenly got a hankering for Hope & Change and offered a sit-down between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Barack Obama. Why would we accept that offer and bolster Ahmadinejad’s prestige? How would that make the US look, sitting down publicly with a regime that bloodily suppressed peaceful demonstrations that demanded accountability for a stolen election? We would be an accessory to Iran’s oppression by giving the mullahcracy more credibility than its own people.
Is this “smart power”?
It's what happens when an idealized fantasy world crashes into reality.
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