Iranian reformists need more vague support!

Robert Kagan makes some good points about Iran in his Washington Post op-ed this morning. He's right that a deal on Iran's nuclear program would only be a small and short-term step towards changing U.S.-Iran relations; he's also right that an Israeli airstrike on Iran would "provide a huge boost" to the regime in exchange for very uncertain benefits.

But then he advises President Obama to treat this as his "tear down this wall" moment:

Now the odds of regime change are higher than the odds the present regime will ever agree to give up its nuclear program. With tougher sanctions, public support from Obama and other Western leaders, and programs to provide information and better communications to reformers, the possibility for change in Iran may never be better.

This seems... overly optimistic, to say the least. Iranian reformists are sharply divided on whether economic sanctions -- even targeted ones, aimed specifically at the Revolutionary Guard's business empire -- would help or hurt the Green Movement.

Public support from Washington is also a divisive issue. Obama could (and should) take a harder line on the regime's human rights abuses, but whether he should provide deeper support is a matter of debate. The Green Movement doesn't want to be portrayed as a tool of the U.S. government.

And even if Obama does these things, tougher public statements and better proxy servers for Twitter will not topple a regime. Khamenei and the IRGC still control a large and pervasive security apparatus. Reformists can't agree on whether they want to totally topple the system, or make smaller changes within the framework of the Islamic Republic. I'll once again quote the Tehran-based activist I interviewed for my piece on the Green Movement last month:

A lot of people in Iran, they look at what's happened in Iraq, the violence, the political uncertainty, and they're not so sure they want a revolution here. That makes them afraid of radical change... some of them lived through the 1979 revolution, and they don't want to repeat that. But the younger people, they don't want to become Iraq.

The U.S. government cannot steer the Iranian people towards regime change. This is a hard reality for some policymakers in Washington to accept: They're (understandably) sympathetic towards the Green Movement, and the prospect of a new Iranian government offers an easy solution to the very difficult nuclear issue.

But there's simply not much that policymakers can do. If the regime falls, it will be because Iranians decided to topple it -- not because of anything that happens on Pennsylvania Avenue.

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