I’m certainly happy that Obama spoke more forcefully yesterday, but Paul Saunders raises a good point in his response to Michael Ledeen. We certainly should never call for rebellion, as George H. W. Bush did in 1991 with regard to Iraq, if we’re not willing to then throw support to the people who are rebelling.

Where I disagree with Saunders is with regard to his assessment of U.S. interests. On one level, resolving the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, Tehran’s violent opposition to the Middle East peace process, and its support for terrorism are all U.S. national security interests. No argument there. On a greater level, however, the fall of this regime — and its replacement by something more moderate — should also be a U.S. interest. It is clear that the protests are no longer about Mousavi; they are about dissatisfaction with the idea of velayat-e faqih, guardianship of the jurist. And certainly, we can have both short-term strategies to deal with the here and now, and long term strategies to get where we want to be.

But, going back to the crux of Saunders’s point — the fact that caution is necessary and that rhetoric should not get ahead of policy: There are still many policy options that the West can consider without becoming responsible for a massacre.

It is clear — and always has been clear — that the Iranian people are far more moderate than the Islamic Republic. It has also always been the case that the Islamic Republic is not a democracy. The question then becomes how can we encourage the Islamic Republic to become more accountable to its people? Here, the Bush administration likely missed a Gdansk moment when we largely ignored the December 2005 formation of the Islamic Republic’s first independent trade union. In autocratic societies, independent trade unions force governments into accountability. Money is finite, especially in a mismanaged economy like Iran’s. Money that pays workers’s wages is not shipped to Hezbollah, Iraq, or other militias.

What else can we do? The regime is now cracking down on demonstrators, arresting protestors at home and alone so the regime does not create a mob reaction. As mentioned here, they are doing this both as a result of some interaction with Chinese security consultants, and also perhaps with technology acquired from Western governments. The White House loses nothing by naming and shaming companies involved.

The regime’s ability to control the media is also a key component of its survival. The policy question which the White House should consider, therefore, is how it can enable a media platform which Iranians can access and which the Iranian government cannot control? Inside-the-Beltway gossip of recent days suggests that the White House and the National Security Council have tasked the intelligence community with determining who has been leading the protests. That may be the wrong question, or only a partial question. It’s all well and good to have the CIA, recipients of billions of dollars, try to figure out what happened after the fact, but it might be more productive to figure out how to maintain an independent tenplate upon which Iranians are free to act however they want to act. One analogy would be to Tiananmen Square. What was more important: Knowing the name of the student who stood before the line of tanks, or having a template in which some brave, unnamed student decided to stand in front of a line of tank?

We should also reassess our own intelligence. Most of the CIA’s analysts are fresh out of college and in their 20s. They have great book knowledge of Iran, but they don’t have a feel for the country. Too often, they fill in the blanks with projection, assuming that the Iranian regime thinks and acts like we do. They therefore read into the Iranian power structure a pragmatism which doesn’t exist. How much has this reading played into our own intelligence products? How much into the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate which, beyond the nuclear issue, also suggested the Iranian government to be more pragmatic than ideological?

Lastly, while journalists describe the Islamic Republic’s politicians on a spectrum ranging from reformist to hardliner, how come we never hear about the factionalism within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? Are they monolithic? No. Have the reformists from within their ranks been purged? Yes. Identifying the factions within the IRGC is crucial to developing policies to crack this bastion of regime support. if our intelligence community doesn’t have answers, they should certainly be tasked to focus far more on this than engage in the sort of policy advocacy which the CIA has been allowed to do over the past several years.

Simply put, there are a whole range of approaches between staying on the sidelines and full-throated involvement. We can advocate for hope and change without being irresponsible. At the very least, we need to be reassessing our policies and identifying the past decades’ mistakes.