Second, for President Obama to hail the demonstrators and denounce the regime would more likely contaminate the cause of the resistance than advance it.
It would be taken as confirmation of the regime's charge that what is going on in the streets of Iran's cities is a replay of the CIA rent-a-mob coup d'etat that took down nationalist Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and put the Shah on the throne.
And other developments are breaking our way.
According to Sunday's New York Times, Iran's production of low-enriched uranium at Natanz is running into problems. The number of operating centrifuges has fallen by 20 percent, to below 4,000. The centrifuges, based on first-generation technology, are breaking down. Others appear defective or sabotaged. There are reports that the low-enriched uranium at Natanz lacks the purity to be highly enriched.
Also, the U.S. revelation that Iran was constructing a secret nuclear-enrichment facility at a Revolutionary Guard base near the holy city of Qum has complicated Iran's problems. Ahmadinejad opened it to U.N. inspectors, who found that it was months if not a year away from completion and capable of housing only 3,000 centrifuges.
Thus, it is either a small fallback production plant in case Natanz is bombed, or it was designed to convert the low-enriched uranium at Natanz into highly enriched weapons-grade uranium.
Iran's problem now, if it is as hell-bent on building a bomb as U.S and Israeli politicians insist, is this. Its major nuclear facilities -- the U.S.-built reactor at Arak, the uranium production plant at Natanz, the unfinished Russian nuclear power plant at Bushehr and the unfinished facility at Qum -- are under U.N. safeguards and inspections.
If Tehran is as close to a bomb as some insist, it would have to have an undiscovered uranium-production plant the size of Natanz and an undiscovered but operational plant like the one being built in Qum to produce the highly enriched uranium needed.
If Iran has such facilities, U.S. intelligence agencies would not be standing by their joint assessment of 2007 that Iran ended its active program for a nuclear weapon back in 2003.
Right now, the cards are falling our way in Iran. Why toss in our hand for sanctions that lead -- to where?