This is another reason President Obama is right not to declare that the United States is on the side of the demonstrators in Tehran or the other cities -- and against the regime.

Should this end in bloodshed, Obama would be blamed for having instigated it, and then abandoned the demonstrators, as Ike's U.S. Information Agency was blamed for having urged the Hungarians to rise and then left them to their fate.

When Vice President Nixon went to the bridge at Andau to welcome the Hungarian patriots fleeing the bloodbath, many cursed America for having misled them into believing we would be at their side.

If Obama cannot assist the demonstrators, why declare we are with them? That would call into question the nationalist credentials of the protesters by tying them to a power not universally loved in Iran. It would play into the hand of the regime by confirming charges that the crowds are "rent-a-mobs" like the ones Kermit Roosevelt and the CIA used to dump over the regime of Muhammad Mossadegh in 1953.

Moreover, the alternative to the Ayatollah and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not a republic that will renounce Islamism and Iran's nuclear program. It is ex-Presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani, and ex-Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, all of whom trace their roots to the Revolution of 1979 and none of whom bears any great love of Uncle Sam.

It is Ayatollah Khomeini's boys versus Ayatollah Khamenei's boys. As Obama observed, in policy terms, there is no great difference.

For six days, the world has watched riveted as hundreds of thousands of Iranians peacefully protested what they believe was a stolen election, challenging the ayatollah who validated it just hours after the polls closed. For six days, the regime, born of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, has been leaking legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of its own people, the Islamic world, the whole world.

Why interfere? Why turn a widening confrontation between the Ayatollah Khamenei and the people into a spat between the president of the United States and the president of Iran?

It is impossible to believe a denunciation of the regime by Obama will cause it to stay its hand if it believes its power is imperiled. But it is certain that if Obama denounces Tehran, those demonstrators will be portrayed as dupes and agents of America before and after they meet their fate.

If standing up and denouncing the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad from 7,000 miles away is moral heroism, it is moral heroism at other people's expense.