In a posting over at Time.com, Joe Klein writes this:

The Washington Post’s increasingly strident op-ed page offers a double-barreled neocon assault on President Obama’s Iran position today by Charles Krauthammer and Paul Wolfowitz. And it’s interesting to see these fellows — among the smartest of the neos — deploy the usual intellectual shortcuts in the neoconservative bag of tricks: Broad, unsupported statements of opinion posing as fact . . . and false historical analogies.
Take Krauthammer. He boldly states this:
The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.
They do? Which ones? Name one.

Okay. How about (for starters) Mohsen Makhmalbaf, described as Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s external spokesman? Foreign Policy magazine did an interview with him that includes this:

FP: There has been growing criticism here in Washington that U.S. President Barack Obama hasn’t said or done enough to support those demonstrating in the streets of Iran. Do you think Obama is being too careful? Or even that he is helping Ahmadinejad by being cautious?
MM: Obama has said that there is no difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. Does he like it himself [when someone is] saying that there is no difference between Obama and [George W.] Bush? Ahmadinejad is the Bush of Iran. And Mousavi is the Obama of Iran.

And this:

FP: Does Mousavi have a message that he’d like to deliver to the international community?
MM: Iran is a very important country in the region, and the changes in Iran could have an influence everywhere. So as a result, it’s not only an internal matter — it’s an international problem. If Iran could be a democratic Islamic country, that would be a pattern, a role model, for other Islamic countries. And even if Iran has a terrorist image [today], it would be a model for other countries [in the future].

These are hardly the words of a person endorsing the Obama (and Klein) approach that Krauthammer so masterfully takes apart.

I could also point Klein to Bret Stephens’s column earlier this week, which included this paragraph:

Here’s a recent comment from one Iranian demonstrator posted on the Web site of the National Iranian American Council. “WE NEED HELP, WE NEED SUPPORT,” this demonstrator wrote. “Time is not on our side. . . . The most essential need of young Iranians is to be recognized by US government. They need them not to accept the results and do not talk to government as an official, approved one.”

Or this first-hand account from an Iranian that appeared in the Wall Street Journal today, which says:

President Obama’s speech was good; he says that he will support us. He also said that nations must decide the fate of their countries by themselves. I agree with him, but now we don’t have any power to change the situation, so we need help and attention. We ask the president not to accept this coup d’etat.

Klein might also want to watch this interview with Amir Fakhravar of the Confederation of Iranian Students, who speaks movingly of the students wanting to “feel support from the free countries, from the government like the U.S. that we are really disappointed from the U.S Government right now, I need to say that.” Fakhravar adds that if the people in the street “feel that kind of support from the free world,” then in the next weeks a revolution, and a free Iran, may come to pass.

These demonstrators are saying to America, at this crucial moment: We need help, we need support, we need attention. I hope we provide it, and soon.

As for Joe: His entire posting is typical of the kind of analysis we would expect of a man who a few days ago described Iran, as compared to the Soviet Union, as “breezy with freedom.” What a nice, positive, upbeat way to describe the Iranian regime. Maybe the hundreds of thousands of people we have seen demonstrate in Iran over the last few days are not aware of how blessed they are to live under the “breezy with freedom” Iran. Maybe if these malcontents only read Joe Klein more, they’d discover how pleased they should be with their situation.