Obama's reticence on Iran stirs stew of opinion

WASHINGTON -- President Obama is taking heat for his measured comments about the post-election protests in Iran.

Obama has said he is troubled by violence against protesters in Tehran, but insists it's up to Iranians to settle their election dispute themselves. For that, he's accused of meddling by the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, Republicans such as John McCain, Obama's rival in last year's U.S. election, accuse the president of not doing enough to help democratic supporters in Iran.

Obama "really is up against a rock and a hard place on this," said Suzanne Maloney, author of Iran's Long Reach: Iran As a Pivotal State in the Muslim World. "He can hurt as much as he can help."

Maloney said Obama is playing it right because Iran would use stronger words by Obama to cast supporters of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi as U.S. puppets. McCain and other critics said Obama is missing a chance to isolate the militant Islamist regime in Tehran and promote democracy.

McCain used Twitter, a networking website also being used heavily by Iranian protesters, on Thursday to say: "Mass peaceful demonstrations in Iran today, let's support them & stand up for democracy & freedom! President & his Admin should do the same."

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, defended Obama on Thursday on the editorial page of The New York Times. Kerry wrote that an aggressive approach, as advocated by McCain, would be seen in Iran as support for Mousavi. If the U.S. really wants to help, Kerry wrote, "we have to understand how our words can be manipulated and used against us to strengthen the clerical establishment."

Obama made no comments about Iran on Thursday, and has spoken only twice about the election and ensuing violence since protests began last weekend. "I stand strongly with the universal principle that people's voices should be heard and not suppressed," he said earlier in the week.

Fariborz Ghadar, a vice minister for the shah of Iran in the 1970s, said Obama is better off saying as little as possible, lest Iran's rulers again cast the U.S. as "the Great Satan." He added that it's hard to know what's really going on, and "we don't even know who's on whose side" in the faction-ridden Iranian government.