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Iran Policy Making

The silent protest began in Imam Khomeini Square in front of the forbidding Ministry of Telecommunications, which was busy cutting off cellphones but powerless to stop the murmured rage coursing through Tehran. Six days had passed since Iran’s disputed June 12 election, but the fury that brought three million people onto the streets the previous Monday showed no sign of abating. “Silence will win against bullets,” a woman beside me whispered. Her name was Zahra. She wore a green headband — the color adopted by the campaign of the defeated reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi — and she held a banner saying, “This land is my land.” The words captured the popular conviction that not only had President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stolen votes, but he also had made off with Iran’s dignity. Slowly the vast crowd began to move north. No chant issued from the throng, only distilled indignation. A young man asked me where I was from. When I told him New York, he shot back: “Give our regards to freedom. It’s coming right here!”

THE JPEG REVOLUTION Images of the June uprisings in Iran, captured by amateur photographers. The protests unsettled not only the hard-liners in Tehranbut also the Obama administration, which has to make policy for a situation that changes as frequently as a Twitter feed.

In those giddy postelectoral days, anything seemed possible, even the arrival of liberty, or at least more of it, in the 30-year-old Islamic Republic. Through the swirl of events — the huge crowds, the beatings and the sirens, the tear gas and black smoke — the core issues were simple. Iranians felt cheated. They wanted their votes to count. They knew that no genuine victor with two-thirds of the vote need resort to brutality or fear a recount. Sometimes they asked me if the United Nations would help them; often they asked if America would. It was their way of saying, with fierce emotion, that the morality of the Iranian story, its right and wrong, was plain.

But it was precisely emotion, and notions of good and evil, that the Obama administration had spent the previous months trying to drain from the charged U.S.-Iranian relationship. Sobriety dominated the ideas of the president’s Iran team, as I’d learned before I left in conversations with senior officials at the State Department and the National Security Council. The Bush administration’s ideologically driven axis-of-evil approach to Iran had failed. Tehran had prospered by expanding its regional influence and was accelerating its nuclear program. The Obama administration believed it was time to seek normalization through a new, cooler look at a nation critical to U.S. strategic interests — from advancing Israeli-Arab peace negotiations to a successful withdrawal from Iraq.

“Who they select as leader in Iran is their prerogative, and there’s nothing we can do to control that,” Ray Takeyh, an Iranian-born adviser to Dennis Ross, the veteran Mideast negotiator who has been working on Iran for the Obama administration, told me before the election. “We’re trying to deal with Iran as an entity, a state, rather than privileging one faction or another. We want to inject a degree of rationality into this relationship, reduce it to two nations with some differences and some common interests — get beyond the incendiary rhetoric.” Takeyh’s words reminded me of Ross, who in his book “Statecraft” defined the term’s first principles as, “Have clear objectives, tailor them to fit reality.”

But now, as the crowd streaming before me demonstrated, Iran’s reality had changed. In his inaugural address, President Obama said: “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” Seldom had a fist been clenched more unequivocally, dissent silenced more harshly or deceit practiced with more brazenness than in Iran after June 12.

Still, Obama’s Iran team — Ross; the courtly under secretary of state William Burns; the dapper deputy national security adviser Tom Donilon; the studious senior N.S.C. official Puneet Talwar (the only one, other than Takeyh, who has been to Iran); the hard-charging organization man Denis McDonough, who controls strategic communication at the White House — faced a difficult choice between sticking with strategic outreach to the regime and questioning its legitimacy in the name of human rights. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose instincts on Iran have always been more hawkish than the president’s, “was pushing for a harder line sooner after the June 12 vote,” a Mideast expert close to her told me last month. She was supported by her friend Joe Biden, the vice president. They did not prevail. The tone was cautious; although Obama’s denunciations of the clampdown grew stronger as it worsened, the extended hand, which had proved more unsettling to Iran than all the Bush administration bluster, was not withdrawn.

When I returned from Iran, I went to see one of these senior officials to ask what it had been like making that call. Painful, was the response. Every day, in the election’s aftermath, the team met and conference-called. “It is difficult to weigh all the different considerations,” this official told me. “But given the profoundly serious consequences of an Iranian regime that acquires a nuclear-weapons capability, the judgment in the end was that it was important to follow through on the offer of direct engagement.” He noted that this offer had been “signaled clearly in the course of the campaign” by Obama, and developed since. In other words, this goes deep with the president. He’s driving Iran policy. The Iran gambit lies close to the core of his refashioned global strategy, America’s “new era of engagement.”

Just how far Obama is ready to go in engagement’s name has become clearer in Iran. At the time of that Thursday demonstration, almost a week after the election, the toughest thing he had found to say about the turmoil was that the suppression of peaceful dissent “is of concern to me and it’s of concern to the American people.” He had also equated Ahmadinejad with Moussavi, from the U.S. national-security standpoint, because both support the nuclear program, even as people died for the greater openness that Moussavi espoused.

A sobered America is back in the realpolitik game. A favored phrase in the Iran team goes, “It is what it is.” Now the question is whether such an approach can yield results. Can Ross honor his own precept to match objectives with “available means”? To the nuclear clock has been added a democracy clock, complicating every diplomatic equation. An Iran of mullahs and nukes has morphed, for many Americans, into the Iran of beautiful, young Neda Agha-Soltan, cut down with a single shot while leaving a June 20 demonstration, a murder caught on video that went viral. Whatever Obama’s realism — and it’s as potent as his instinct for the middle ground — a president on whom so much youthful idealism has been projected can scarcely ignore the Neda effect.

The Obama administration’s strong conviction, as several officials told me, is that Ahmadinejad’s election was fraudulent. But in the American interest, it is ready to overlook that and to talk. Restored relations with the Soviet Union came in 1933 at the time of the Great Terror, and with China in 1972 in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. But of course the bloodshed then — of an altogether different dimension — was not being YouTubed around the globe.