So far, this is what things look like in Iran: Ayatollah Khamenei, the cleric who styles himself The Supreme Guide, has chosen that President Ahmadi-nejad should continue in office, and probably made that choice well before the election. Many people in the country are not in favor of this outcome, although it’s impossible to be sure exactly who, where, and how many because the only evidence we have of the fact are tweets and grainy cellphone video.

We also know that the opposition has taken to the streets, and that there has been violence against them by militias resonsible, probably not to Ahmadi-nejad, but to the mullahs that he works for. One interpretation is that the people of Iran have been fooled by a fantasy that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was actually a harbinger of democracy and political liberty. Iran appears to have quietly become a military dictatorship like any other, with periodic rigged elections intended to provide no more than a thin veneer of legitimacy to the established political power.

Are the people of Teheran getting a rude awakening to the fact that their dreams of democracy have been a cruel joke played at their expense? If this is the correct interpretation, then you should probably bet not on the people with rocks, knives and cellphones, but rather on the people with guns, tear gas, and water cannon. If the Islamic Revolution ever intended to have a dimension of participatory democracy and consent of the governed, it surely doesn’t now.

My question, however, is about the implications for US policy. Iran today still is what is was before the election: a very large, resource-rich nation, with ambitions of regional hegemony backed by nuclear weapons, a commitment to end the existence of Israel, and a demonstrated willingness to sponsor armed troublemakers in Iraq and Palestine. At the very least, our challenge is to moderate Iran’s behavior. (Forget about secondary objectives like ensuring that they don’t become an instrument of regional policy for the Russians or the Chinese.)

If these were the early days of the Bush Administration rather than the Obama Administration, one expects that we’d be hearing talk about changing the leadership of Iran, as a way of changing the behavior of Iran. After the experience of Iraq, it will be a cold day in Hell before any American President entertains a similar thought.

That leaves Obama with a choice of strategies, and the choice just got a lot more interesting.

Obama promised many times during his campaign that he would engage the Iranian leadership in open dialog. He knows that people are often suckers for a man with a golden tongue. (How else would used cars ever be sold? Or used automakers, for that matter?) Obama apparently expects that if he asks them nicely enough, the mullahs will soften some aspects of their behavior.

I’m not going to discuss here whether this basic approach makes any sense, although that’s an interesting question that deserves a lot of debate. I will point out that it depends fundamentally on one specific change from the Bush Administration’s approach:

Obama’s policy toward Iran is based on recognizing the legitimacy of the existing government. That’s what it means to engage them in open dialog.

But now, the whole world is witness that the Iranian mullahs are intent on enforcing a military dictatorship, very much of the kind that American policy has long opposed, if for no other reason than because we believe that people ought to be free.

It’s a side point that Obama has walked away from this bedrock principle of American foreign policy, and it would be interesting to know precisely why. Is it because helping other nations to achieve freedom is a difficult and thankless enterprise, as we learned in Iraq? Or is it because he doesn’t actually believe in freedom itself, as his domestic policy initiatives suggest? And to continue the tangent, how does this question reflect on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the two nations where Obama has indeed declared a strong foreign-policy interest? What, precisely, are Obama’s objectives in being involved in those two states?

But back to the choice that Obama faces in Iran. He has committed to engage in open dialog with the Iranian regime. But that regime has now shown itself to have some qualities that are… well, objectionable. Obama now must clarify whether he’s meant all along to engage in dialog with AN Iranian regime, or with THIS Iranian regime.

In other words, is he committed to dialog with whatever leadership should emerge in Iran? Or is he committed to this particular set of mullahs, who are now killing their own citizens in order to solidify their power?

If his choice is the latter, that would exlain Obama’s circumspect behavior of recent days. If he is intent on continuing his conversations with the Khamenei regime, then he would want to do nothing to destabilize them. In an Orwellian way, this also explains his most noted public statement on the matter so far, which is that the US shouldn’t “meddle” in Iran’s internal affairs because the appearance of support by the US would make the protesters vulnerable to “legal action” (an ingenious euphemism if ever there was one).

If Obama’s commitment were rather to honor the will of the Iranian nation, he’d be demanding evidence of the legitimacy of the election, rather than standing by, waiting for the dust to settle. Should we be concerned about how Obama would behave if significant domestic challenges emerged to his own regime? In either case, it would be good to know just exactly what Obama is thinking.

Have you noticed that we seem to ask that question about him an awful lot? For me, it’s just not good enough to let him be a blank screen on which everyone can project what he wishes to see (as he famously described himself). He’s the President of the United States. His job is supposed to be about leadership. Not about public relations.

Read more at Francis Cianfrocca’s blog.