Obama’s Iran policy has been an ethical and practical embarrassment from the beginning. Moral equivalence? The president put Mousavi — and, by extension, the crowds in the street — and Ahmadinejad on the same moral plain.

Naïveté? For the first few days the administration and its flaks in the media issued pompous “in the know” suggestions to the effect that Ahmadinejad may have “really” won the election.

Straw men? We were supposed to think that those who from the beginning saw the issues at stake and supported the reformers with strong words of encouragement were some sort of interventionist neocons who wanted to do another Iraq-like invasion, or would egg on reluctant demonstrators only to betray them in Hungary-like fashion.

Naked realpolitik? We openly stated that we were unsure who would win, with the obvious inference that we are hedging our bets at the expense of values and principles. Our moral outrage, in the words of the president himself, hinges on the outcome of the struggle at hand.

Hesitancy? Over some ten days, we’ve seen split-the-difference, 50/50, “debate going on” fluff, as if risking one’s life to promote freedom is just a narrative that competes with another from thugs who wish to crush them.

Diplomatic confusion? No one apparently appreciates the stakes at hand, that there was an outside chance that many of the key issues of our time — from lunantic nuclear proliferation to terrorist susbidies to undermine neighboring democracies — are in play, and worth the risk of strong moral condemnation of the Iranian theocracy. It is almost as if this administration assumes a nuclear Iran is a done deal, and is now more worried about scrambling to come up with plans B and C.

Dissimulation? We are to believe that outreach to the Iranian mullahs and Islam in general, in the al-Arabiya interview, the Cairo speech, and the video sent to Ahmadinejad explain the popular uprising against a theocratic radical Islamist dictatorship — rather than the intrinsic desire for freedom among millions deprived of freedom by a 7th-century ruling Islamist clique, not to mention the presence of a still vibrant Shiite-majority democracy next-door in Iraq? What logic– speaking out in praise of Islam appealed to those opposing radical Islam to such an extent that then going silent in their hour of need helped them even more.