This Isn't About Us

Kristol has a seemingly gracious plea out to his fellow Republicans:

[Obama] is our president. We could be at an historical inflection point in Iran. The United States may be able to play an important role. The task now is to explain what the Obama administration (and Congress) should be saying and doing, and to urge them to do what they should be doing. Presuming ahead of time that Obama will fail to exercise leadership, and cataloguing this episode pre-emptively as another in a list of Obama failures, would be a mistake. The U.S. has a huge stake in the possible transformation, or at least reformation, of the Iranian regime. If there's some chance of that happening, and some chance of U.S. policy contributing to that outcome, we should hope Obama does the right thing, and urge and pressure him to do so--because then the United States will be doing the right thing, and the United States, and the world, will benefit.

That's a relief. But it is not necessarily prudent to intervene in any way right now. What the president must do is refuse to recognize the sham government and demand an inquiry into the election. Ahmadinejad wants to turn this into an Iran-vs.-America story. It isn't. It's the Iranian people against a coup. Ackerman parses.