Disengagement With IranAfter its fraudulent election, Obama should harden his stance with Iran.

Read more of Slate's coverage of Iran's June 12 election and its aftermath.

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This is a common problem in analyzing dictatorships. In the October 1964 issue of a now-defunct USIA-sponsored journal called Problems of Communism, a prominent Kremlinologist named William Griffith, who had extensive CIA ties, wrote a savage critique of the notion, propagated by a few scholars at the time, that rival power factions were quarreling within the Kremlin. Griffith proclaimed that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's power was as unchallenged and absolute as Josef Stalin's had ever been. The very month that the issue was published, Khrushchev was overthrown by a rival faction.

Whatever is going on inside Tehran's ruling circles, now is not the time for Obama to engage in outreach. Rather, it's time to up the ante, to make the mullahs—especially those who might be inclined to cast off Ahmadinejad—realize that if they're going to play democracy, they can't rig the deck and violate the will of their people, at least not so blatantly.

Some "smart sanctions" against Iran have had a modicum of success in the past: freezing financial transactions and foreign bank accounts; severely cutting back on capital investment; and banning the export of oil-refining equipment, which the Iranians painfully need. The Europeans have been reluctant, out of economic self-interest, to go along with these steps in the past. Perhaps moral shaming, to which they're sometimes more vulnerable than we are, can be piled on.

The problem with former President George W. Bush's policy of "democracy promotion" was threefold. First, it was hypocritical: He supported dissidents in certain countries and dictatorships in others. Second, it sought, at least rhetorically, to impose Western-style democracy without regard to a country's political terrain. Third, in places where a civil society had not yet developed, elections could exacerbate violence and harm U.S. interests. (Case in point: the Palestinian territories.)

The situation with Iran is different. The movement for change is arising from within. What sort of politics the protesters advocate isn't clear. And the protesters seem to be more aligned with Western interests: Journalists who have traveled in Iran and talked with reformers say that they're among the most pro-American people they've ever met.

This is not to say that we should send in spies or special-ops troops to provide covert aid to the protesters or their favored candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi. The discovery of American fingerprints would spur a backlash, raising memories of the CIA-backed coup of 1953. Nonetheless, it wouldn't be a bad idea for someone with a knack for subtlety to probe the fissures for possibilities of new leaders rising to power.

Meanwhile, according to NPR's Deborah Amos, U.S. officials visiting Damascus in the past few days—in the wake of Lebanon's more satisfying election—have emerged with happy faces from meetings with their Syrian counterparts. The details aren't yet clear, but this might be an opportune moment to start luring Syria away from its Iranian alliance. Without its Syrian middlemen, Iran would have a much harder time influencing events in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.

Obama has backed the idea of diplomacy with Iran because Iran is too powerful in the region to ignore. Ahmadinejad said, after he was officially declared the winner, that his victory was the harbinger of a further hardening of foreign policy. So if diplomacy is likely to be futile as well as unseemly, an alternative course might be to take steps to make Iran less powerful, its rulers less comfortable. Hold out the prospect of normal relations if a new election, or at least a real vote count, is held. But in the meantime, tighten the screws.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

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