Foreign Policy has a fascinating interview with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mousavi’s “external spokesman.” In it, he seems to be chastising Obama for saying there’s no difference between Mosavi and Ahmadinejad, saying that Mousavi is the Obama of Iran and Ahmadinejad is the Bush. The weaknesses of the analogy notwithstanding, that’s not the sort of thing you would expect him to say if he wasn’t looking for more support from America. Indeed, as Steve Hayes notes, “One assumes that if Obama’s full-throated support for the protesters would do great damage to their cause, as many Obama defenders have suggested, Mousavi’s spokesman might have taken the opportunity to say so. He didn’t.”

Makhmalbaf also offers this intriguing overture:

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].

It seems to me that this is at minimum a hint that Mousavi would be willing to put the nuke program on the table for negotiation — the complete opposite position of Ahmadinejad. Moreover, it hints or at least suggests that the way Iran meddles in other countries — i.e. financing terrorism, sponsoring terrorist groups etc — would not be locked in stone either. Now, of course, this could all be a ruse. Mousavi is no angel. But, again, these are not things the opposition would want to say if they wanted America to stay out of it. And yes, even if the opposition wants support, that doesn’t mean they’ve made the right calculation. The law of unintended consequences is universal as is the rule of thumb, “Be careful what you wish for.” But Obama supporters and others who think America should do nothing to help the opposition need to at least wonder whether they have a better grasp of the situation than the opposition itself does.