As protest looms, US keeps its distance

February 10, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — At first blush, it seems like a godsend for U.S. foreign policy: a tenacious Iranian opposition, democratic in name at least, is challenging a regime that has caused the U.S. no end of headaches over the last 30 years.

However, as huge new street protests loom in Tehran on Thursday, the 31st anniversary of Iran’s Islamic revolution, the Obama administration is keeping its distance from the “green movement” that sprouted during last June’s disputed presidential elections.

President Barack Obama and his aides have criticized Iran’s human-rights record in the face of the regime’s security crackdown, with its widespread arrests and several executions. They’ve offered little encouragement and no aid to the protesters.

Senior U.S. officials expressed empathy for the protesters in interviews with McClatchy. Given the history of American intervention in Iran, however, anything the U.S. government does to try to help would do more harm than good, they said. In addition, the Obama administration seems leery of banking its Iran policy on a protest movement that could sputter out or be crushed.

“We’re in for a stalemate ... an extended one,” predicted a senior State Department official, who requested anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. The opposition will persist “but won’t be capable of bringing down the government.”

The regime, led by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, so far has been unwilling to order a full-scale, Tiananmen Square-like massacre of the protesters. “The government is concerned about crossing a limit where they risk losing the loyalty of their own security forces,” the official said.

Defying government warnings, reform-movement leaders have called on supporters to surge into the streets Thursday, 31 years after the Feb. 11, 1979, collapse of the U.S.-backed regime of the late Shah of Iran. The government is expected to mass tens of thousands of its supporters as well.

In parallel to the looming confrontation, Iran and Western countries are in an increasingly tense standoff over Tehran’s nuclear program.

Obama came to office determined to try and strike a deal with Iran on the nuclear issue. He’s repeatedly offered talks, authorizing the highest-level U.S.-Iranian encounter in three decades.

By all accounts, the White House was caught off guard when supporters of presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi poured into the streets last summer, braving attacks from state security forces to protest an election they said was stolen by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

As protests have erupted since, the Obama team has stuck to a carefully worded script. The U.S. has demanded that Iran adhere to international human-rights norms, a position that allows the White House to say it is not singling out Iran or goading on the protesters.