Why America is No Longer the Enemy in Iran

Roger Cohen a wonderful piece about the Obama administration's policy towards Iran and its efforts for greater engagement. The part that really caught my attention is Cohen's explanation of how Obama has taken America out of the equation in Iran and why we no longer are the enemy. Essentially engagement does not actually have to work, the point is that it the possiblity of engagement no longer makes America seem like the bad guy. This puts pressure on the regime and allows for greater criticism of those in power:

"One of the first people I saw in Iran was Saeed Leylaz, an economist close to Moussavi. (Like many of Iran’s reformist intellectuals, Leylaz is now in jail.) He told me Obama’s outreach — his recognition of the Islamic Republic and pledge of “mutual respect” — had affected the campaign, unsettling hard-liners. “Radicalism creates radicalism,” Leylaz said. He was referring to the way President Bush’s talk of Iran as evil opened the way for Ahmadinejad to build a global brand of sorts through lambasting U.S. arrogance.

By contrast, a black American president of partly Muslim descent reaching out to the Islamic world — and demonstrating, by his very election, the possibility of change — had placed the Iranian regime on the defensive. One conservative Iranian official put it this way to Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “If Iran can’t make nice with a U.S. president named Barack Hussein Obama who’s preaching mutual respect and sending us greetings, it’s pretty clear the problem lies in Tehran, not Washington.”