As a fan of contrarian political analysis, I’ve enjoyed reading reading Daniel Larison’s take on the Iranian elections. (See here, here and here, for example.) A sample:

We pick sides like this all the time, and when we do it is almost always arbitrary, ill-informed and mistaken. For various reasons, one side in a contest is deemed to be more “pro-Western,” which occasionally even has the virtue of being true, and this side’s victory is then lauded as a great step forward, and anything preventing that victory is deemed inherently suspicious and illegitimate. In many cases, there really is fraud being perpetrated by the other, “anti-Western” side, and I don’t doubt that this is true to some extent in Iran, but the truly incomprehensible thing for so many Westerners is the possibility that the authoritarian populist whom Washington loathes actually commands majority support in his own country and could probably win without fraud.

I’m tempted to agree with much of what Larison says, especially when I see vaguely creepy blog posts like this one, hailing the response to the elections as a sign of a reviving idealist consensus in US foreign policy. (Oh dear.) But I think Larison is wrong in two respects. First, as an empirical matter, he goes too far in playing down the case that large-scale electoral fraud did indeed occur in Iran. I won’t go into all the evidence here, but you can look at this, this and this if you’re curious. Suffice to say that while the evidence is not dispositive, every expert and regional specialist on Iran that I’ve read says that the voting pattern in the election is extremely hard to explain unless you assume that a large degree of fraud took place, and I find their arguments convincing.

Second, and more importantly, I think Larison underestimates the extent to which a reformist government in Iran would benefit American national interests (and the goal of international stability more generally). I understand the counter-arguments here: that Iran’s president doesn’t control foreign policy anyway, that the major areas of dispute (such as the nuclear issue) stem from underlying clashes of national interest that will not abate simply because Iran goes through a change of presidency, and so on. Nevertheless, it also true that a more liberal Iran, with a government less viscerally hostile towards Israel, would not pose nearly the sort of international problem that Iran does today. A reformed, normalised Iran might be willing to accept US security guarantees to shore up its sovereignty in an admittedly dangerous part of the world; or, even if it is insisted on building nuclear weapons as a deterrent, would be tolerable in the same way that a nuclear-armed India can be tolerated. A Mousavi presidency would not by itself take Iran to that point, but it would help to advance a more general process of Iranian liberalisation and reform, and that would be a good thing for both Iran and the United States.

When it comes to tactics though, I largely with Larison: Obama is right to keep a rhetorical distance from Mousavi and the Iranian protesters, rather than create the impression that they are agents of a foreign government. I must also confess that I can’t see any point in recolouring websites green or wearing a green tie in solidarity with the protesters. This strikes me as too much like the equivalent of signing an online petition or passing on a political chain letter; a slacktivist gesture that allows the person making it to feel good about themselves without actually having any impact on the issue they purport to care about.