Stopped Clock Is Right Alert

Every now and again something a conservative blowhard says makes actual sense, and today's contestant is bad ol' Pat "Southern Strategy" Buchanan on the U.S. staying out of Iran.

What should we do now? Wait for the dust to settle.

No U.S. denunciation of what took place in Iran is as credible as the reports and pictures coming out of Iran. Those reports, those pictures are stripping the mullahs of the only asset they seemed to possess -- that, even if fanatics, they were principled, honest men.

Like Hamas, it was said of them that at least they were not corrupt, that at least they did not cheat the people.

No more. Today, in the streets of Tehran and other cities, they call to mind "Comrade Bob" Mugabe in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will never recapture that revolutionary purity he once seemed to possess as the man of the people who was elected president in the upset of 2005. Today, he appears, as The New York Times puts it, "as the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical military and political elite that is more unified and emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution."

There are other reasons Obama should not heed the war hawks howling for confrontation now.

When your adversary is making a fool of himself, get out of the way. That is a rule of politics Lyndon Johnson once put into the most pungent of terms. U.S. fulminations will change nothing in Tehran. But they would enable the regime to divert attention to U.S. meddling in Iran's affairs and portray the candidate robbed in this election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, as a poodle of the Americans.

When Nikita Khrushchev bathed the Hungarian revolution in blood, Ike did not break relations. Khrushchev was at Camp David three years later. When Deng Xiaoping and Co. ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square, George Bush I did not break relations. When Moscow ordered Warsaw to crush Solidarity, Ronald Reagan did not let that act of repression deter him from seeking direct talks to reduce nuclear weapons.

Again, let us wait for the dust to settle.

Buchanan may be a racist asshole, but he's 100% correct on Obama's response to Iran: nothing.

This too, will pass. Like it or not, Iran is going to have to work this out, and there's basically nothing we can do about it that won't make the situation worse on the ground in Tehran.