Oh really? I was under the impression that it was a referendum on Iran's future. Roger Cohen seemed pretty sure that a cresting reform movement had coalesced into "a green tsunami, a transformative wave unfurling down the broad avenues of the Iranian capital." But now Juan Cole says that Obama should ignore the results because the Iranian President actually has no power?

Ladies and gentlemen, one of the reality based community's leading deliberative lights:

Less was at stake in these elections than many outsiders assumed, however, since the Iranian presidency is weak and most important policy is set by Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei (his title is the giveaway). The election was mostly about style, rather than substance. Mir-Hossein Moussavi complained that Ahmadinejad's bizarre downplaying of the Holocaust had made Iran a laughingstock, and that the incumbent had dictatorial tendencies. But... most of his differences with Ahmadinejad were on domestic policy, including his advocacy of more personal liberties, more rights for women, and a freer media environment, including private television channels.

The outcome of the election therefore changes little for the Obama administration. ... Obama is determined to deal with them by undercutting Iran on the Palestine issue by making strides toward a Palestinian state, by avoiding military confrontation, and by direct talks... These policies... should be pursued regardless of who holds the weak and ineffectual office of president in Tehran.

Since Cole is an eminent scholar devoted to pursuing facts regardless of their consequences - excepting that time when he admitted he's up to the exact opposite - I can only assume that this analysis is made in good faith. If Moussavi had won Cole would still have published an article denying the importance of the election. He would have grudgingly but forthrightly sided with the pro-Israel writers who've been downplaying Mousavi's importance for weeks. The phrase "Obama Effect" wouldn't have come up even once, on account of Cole's noted intellectual honesty.

But that wouldn't make his arguments about the implications of this election, which went down this way, any less stupid.

The significance of the mullahs' charade isn't just that it gives Ahmadinejad another four years. That's bad, but ultimately Iranian policy really is a function of the Byzantine intrigue around Khamenei. What the results show is that Khamenei is either an brazen hardliner or under the control of brazen hardliners. He was willing to risk the legitimacy of the entire Islamic Republic to reinstall a hard-line crony as President. If Cole is right and the Presidency really is symbolic, that makes Khamenei's ideologically bullheadedness even worse.

Either Ahmadinejad and his messianic ilk have the Supreme Leader's ear or they have enough power to force his hand. Either way it should be game over for negotiations. If they were intellectually honest, the foreign policy left would say "we've been pushing engagement for a decade because we said it might pry Khamenei away from the hard-liners, but now that seems like a lost cause."

Of course that's not how it'll play out. The White House has already declared that it's moving full speed ahead on dialogue. Obama's MSM and academic cheerleaders will continue with their agenda-oriented reasoning, where Ahmadinejad's loss would have been a watershed and Ahmadinejad's win doesn't matter. And they'll continue to coat their blustering with the most obnoxious kind of smug pseudo-sophistication.

But it should be game over.

References and previously after the jump...