EDITORS' NOTE: Reuters and other foreign media are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran.

Time Magazine reporter, Howard Chua-Eoan, wrote that the world is reduced to getting the Iranian story from snippets

"Arriving over the internet transom, rough and insistent and bloody, were the tiny electronic dispatches from protesters forced off the streets of Tehran, shaky videos from a city screaming for help."

Rather than cowering in the face of Obama's "strongest response," Reuters reported that the Iranian government, instead, issued new warnings against the demonstrators whom it described as "terrorists" and warned that "police would confront all gatherings and unrest with all its strength."

We don't know how this is going to turn out. The most likely outcome will be that the protesters will realize there will be no help - other than "strong responses" coming from the West - and the protests will, like a hurricane after it has made landfall, run out of heat and dissipate into interesting but relatively harmless rainstorms.

If that is the case, the Obama new year's video may well come to be compared to President John F. Kennedy's Bay of Pigs - when promises of help were withdrawn and we have watched the half-century rule of the Castro brothers over the people of Cuba.

North Korea is testing Obama. Iran is testing Obama. The Taliban are testing Obama. Even Jimmy Carter is testing Obama.

Carter, while everything else is falling apart, visited Gaza and was shown a school which the ruling Hamas said had been damaged by the Israelis.

Carter said said "it's very distressing to me" that the school had been "deliberately destroyed by bombs from F-16s made in my country and delivered to the Israelis."

With friends like Carter, who needs …"