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**Sir X** · June 20, 2009, 06:19 PM

Gauging Whether Obama Is Creating Openings in Iran
Newsha Tavakolian/Polaris, for The New York Times
OUTWARD LOOKING Mir Hussein Moussavi supporters campaigning.

f('Iran’s opposition talks of presenting a new face to the wider world. Could there be something to all the talk of an Obama effect, after all?')

- Published: June 20, 2009

“We don’t want this regime to fall. We want our votes to be counted, because we want reforms, we want kindness, we want friendship with the world.” — Ali Reza, an Iranian actor, on the sidelines of protests in Tehran.
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Times Topics: Iran

WASHINGTON — Could there be something to all the talk of an Obama effect, after all? A stealth effect, perhaps?
As the silent protests in Tehran dominated television screens around the world last week, a peculiar debate in Washington erupted. On one side, a handful of supporters of President Bush said Iranian protesters had taken to the streets because they were emboldened by President Bush’s pro-democracy stance, and the example of Shiite democracy he set up in Iraq. On the other side, some of President Obama’s backers countered that the mere election of Barack Obama in the United States had galvanized reformers in Iran to demand change.
Both of those arguments gave the United States an outsize role at the epicenter of an unfolding story that most experts, and a great many Iranians who talked to pollsters, said was actually not about America at all; it was about Iran and its own problems, notably a highly disputable vote count and the performance of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“We have to be a little humble about our understanding about what’s going on in Iran,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who was a State Department under secretary for President Bush. “There’s been massive disappointment in Ahmadinejad’s stewardship over the years.”
Even so, something else was also at play: the wistful comments of many Iranian protesters who dreamed of better relations with the world. That strand of thought, however slender among the other huge issues, was evident at the protest demonstrations on behalf of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s principal challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi. Sign after sign at his rallies was emblazoned: “A new greeting to the world.”
“Behind closed doors, most Iranian officials have long recognized that the ‘death to America’ culture of 1979 is bankrupt, and that Iran will never achieve its enormous potential as long as relations with the United States remain adversarial,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He and others argue that many Iranian pragmatists and moderates believe that their country in 2009 is facing a now-or-never moment.
“If Tehran’s hardliners are incapable of making nice with an American president named Barack Hussein Obama who preaches mutual respect and wishes them a happy Nowruz, it’s pretty obvious the problem is in Tehran, not Washington,” Mr. Sadjadpour said.
During the Bush years, Iran’s regime was able to coalesce support by uniting the country against a common enemy: President Bush, who called Iran a pillar of the “axis of evil” in a speech that alienated many of the very reformers whom the United States was trying to woo. For much of his administration, even as he strengthened Iran by toppling Iran’s nemesis Saddam Hussein, Mr. Bush struck a confrontational public line against the Iranian regime.
The result, according to many experts here and in Iran, was that Iranians, including reformers, swallowed their criticism of the hard-line regime and united against the common enemy. Iranians with reformist sympathies even began advising Americans to stop openly supporting them, lest that open them to attack as pawns of America.
Mr. Obama seemed to be taking that kind of advice to heart last week — to a fault, perhaps, as even some Democratic allies said. He kept his remarks about the Iranian election so cool and detached that Republicans quickly attacked him as showing weakness in the defense of democracy.
On the other hand, he had already put in play a tool that the reformists could use in their internal debate — the notion that this could be the best time in many years in which to seek better relations with America.
Even before he was elected, Mr. Obama struck a conciliatory note towards Iran, saying that the idea of not talking to adversaries was “ridiculous.” And while the substance of his Iran policy does not vary that much from Mr. Bush’s — the United States still seeks to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, still criticizes Iran’s support for militant Islamist organizations, still allies itself staunchly with Israel — he has taken pains to flavor that policy with different atmospherics.
He has offered direct talks between his administration and the Iranian regime, without preconditions. He has videotaped a message directly for the Iranian people, on the celebration of Nowruz, the 12-day holiday that marks the new year in Iran. In the video, with subtitles in Persian, he directed his comments not just to the Iranian people but to Iran’s leaders, and referred to Iran as “the Islamic Republic,” further flagging a willingness to deal with the clerical government. He even went so far as to quote from the vaunted Persian poet Saadi, dead for 700 years now.
Mr. Obama has also removed the ban against American diplomats around the world consorting with their Iranian counterparts. And in his Cairo address June 4, he accepted responsibility for America’s part in the enmity between the United States and Iran.
“In the middle of the cold war, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government,” Mr. Obama said — a reference to the 1953 coup in which an Iranian prime minister, under whom Iran had nationalized its oil industry, was overthrown and the now-despised Shah was restored to power.
The response to Mr. Obama’s overtures from the Iranian alliance of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad has been, largely, silence.
But Afshin Molavi, an Iran expert at the New America Foundation, said that the vast majority of Iranians today want better relations with the United States, and middle-class Iranians in particular, he said, were hoping that the Iranian regime would capitalize on Mr. Obama’s much talked about unclenched fist.
Even though Mr. Moussavi shared the leadership’s commitment to Iran’s nuclear program, many middle-class Iranians believed that he would be better able than Mr. Ahmadinejad to strike a warmer relationship with Mr. Obama, said Mr. Molavi, author of “Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran” (Norton). “When the election results were announced, for the Iranian middle class, it was not only an insult and an injustice, but it dashed their hopes for a U.S.-Iran rapprochement and told them that they would continue to be isolated in the world.”
In his campaign, Mr. Moussavi used many tactics that echoed Mr. Obama’s. He pledged to re-engage politically with the United States; he used posters of himself and his wife side by side, and he hired a young chief strategist who said he looked to the Obama campaign for ideas. Mr. Moussavi, like Mr. Obama, even used social networks on the Internet to campaign. And once the count was in, his supporters found new uses for the networks in their uniquely Iranian fight.

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Obama rightly staying out of Iran ..In other words

Obama rightly staying out of Iran ..In other words

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