Tehran Spring

The streets of Tehran, and most cities in Iran, are filled with people protesting last week's blatantly stolen presidential election. The Iranian government's attempts at a media blackout have failed miserably as social channels like YouTube and Twitter are filled with back-channel information. The people get their message out any way they can. The eyes of the world are on Iran, and no one wants a Persian replay of China's 1989 Tienanmen Square crackdown.

Here at home, the Republicans are naturally playing politics with this whole thing, with often unintentionally hilarious results:

• Rep. John Culberson of Texas called his party "oppressed minorities" because the House leadership cut off debate on a bill.
• Rep Pete Hoekstra of Mississippi went even further, tweeting that the Iranian people's struggle for a free and fair election was just like "what we did in House last year when Republicans were shut down in the House."
  

Sure, they're exactly alike.

After President Obama spoke out in favor of the protesters, the GOP jumped all over him demanding that he do more. Senator Lindsey Graham called the president "timid and passive," and the usual suspects muttered darkly that with Obama's "Muslim past," he is surrendering to Tehran.

Of course, anyone who knows anything about recent Iranian history knows full well that tough talk from Obama on the situation in Iran would backfire. Badly.

After Mohammad Mossadegh became prime minister in 1951, he nationalized Iran's oil resources and thus ran afoul of the American and British oil companies. The United States responded by sending in the CIA to foment a coup, which overthrew Mossadegh in 1953.

Installed in his place was Shah Reza Pahlevi, who quickly did his backers' bidding by handing his country's oil back to the corporations and turning the country into a repressive autocracy. Clamping down on any dissent and political opposition, the Shah radicalized the Iranian people, making them easy pickings for the hardline Ayatollah Khomeini.

After Khomeini overthrew the Shah in 1979 and set up his own repressive government, he never failed to refer to the United States as the "Great Satan." And while the Iranian government no longer depicts the US as a satanic monster, the memory of the American intervention and the Shah's rule is very much alive and well in the country's political psyche.

Which explains why Obama is watching his words carefully when it comes to Iran. He knows very well that any overt American support for the protesters would rally Iranian public support around the government, stolen election or no stolen election.

But the Republicans don't care about that. There are points to be scored, no matter how cheap.