Perhaps because of confusion about who they mullahs are and how they have waged war on the west for the past 30 years, there is much more hesitation now about the turmoil sweeping Iran than there ever was about the European upheavals of twenty years ago. Today there is no "consensus" in the U.S. about the illegitimacy of the theocracy that Khomeini built and that Khamenei has maintained. The American media just doesn't spend much time on the nature of the regime, or the viciousness with which it imprisons and tortures its enemies, or the degree to which it exports terror.

How could there be when institutions like Columbia University thought nothing of inviting Ahmadinejad to address its students? Moral clarity about a regime --and thus about its opponents-- cannot be achieved and maintained in am environment that condemns not the regime that is evil but the president who bluntly declared that regime to be so.

The paralysis that has gripped the Obama Administration as the massive display of human courage in Tehran and elsewhere has unfolded is thus not surprising even though it is deeply disappointing and dispiriting. How hard should it be for President Obama to declare unequivocally and with specificity that the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime should not murder its opponents, should not fire into crowds, should not sweep through the university campus and drag away suspected student leaders?

The cool detachment of President Obama about the events in Iran is a huge stain on the young presidency, but one that could still be erased if the president and his secretary of state move quickly to speak in clear statements about the rightness of the cause of the protestors, and the world's expectation that the regime will not use violence. The president should announce that violent repression of the protests will lead to the end of his outreach to the mullahs and to a guarantee of even greater isolation from the rest of the world.

That's what FDR and Truman did. It is what JFK and Reagan did. It is what W did again and again.

And it is what President Obama should do. Today and tomorrow and throughout the weeks ahead.