Glenn Greenwald: The "Bomb Iran" contingent's newfound concern for the Iranian People. The conditioned response of most Americans to the post-election events in Iran is to accept the line that the election was stolen and to embrace the protesters. That's partly because we've been conditioned to loathe Ahmadinejad and the Islamic Republic's clerical leaders, and partly because we assume that the Iranian people secretly want to to live like us and do the things we do -- forgetting for the moment that we didn't take to the streets in 2000 when our own election was stolen. Much of this conditioning comes from the nonstop propagandizing of warmongers who, borrowing a page from Bush's "axis of evil" speech, have long set their hearts on crippling Iran. But now, seeing this outpouring of quasi-American dissent, even the hawks are getting warm and fuzzy for masses of people they wanted to wipe off the map just a few moments ago:

Much of the same faction now claiming such concern for the welfare of The Iranian People are the same people who have long been advocating a military attack on Iran and the dropping of large numbers of bombs on their country -- actions which would result in the slaughter of many of those very same Iranian People. During the presidential campaign, John McCain infamously sang about Bomb, Bomb, Bomb-ing Iran. The Wall St. Journal published a war screed from Commentary's Norman Podhoretz entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran," and following that, Podhoretz said in an interview that he "hopes and prays" that the U.S. "bombs the Iranians." John Bolton and Joe Lieberman advocated the same bombing campaign, while Bill Kristol -- with typical prescience -- hopefully suggested that Bush might bomb Iran if Obama were elected. Rudy Giuliani actually said he would be open to a first-strike nuclear attack on Iran in order to stop their nuclear program.

Imagine how many of the people protesting this week would be dead if any of these bombing advocates had their way -- just as those who paraded around (and still parade around) under the banner of Liberating the Iraqi People caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of them, at least.

Of course, not all of the hawks have gone soft. Israel's hardest core supporters, like Daniel Pipes, were as much as campaigning for Ahmadinejad, and AIPAC was pushing an Iran Sanctions Enabling Act of 2009 (HR 1327) to remind the Iranian people how much we hated them. Since the election not much has changed with them. Some, like Robert Kagan, now insist that Obama to come out in support of the protesters -- advice which if followed would inevitably backfire. The US, left anyone forget it, has previously interfered in Iranian domestic politics: in 1953 the CIA hired some clerics and thugs to stage fake-communist riots to set the stage for a military coup that overturned Iran's democracy and installed the Shah as proxy until his megalomania got the best of him. The US has interfered in domestic politics all over the world, so frequently that the CIA is suspected everywhere, but there's no reason to think that the CIA has any practical ability to affect what's going on in Iran today, let alone direct it toward any sort of sensible goals -- even if we had any.

The biggest problem for American politicians is understanding that what's going on in Iran isn't about US. It looks like an internal struggle at the highest levels of power within the Islamic Republic. The stakes may be huge there and for the people of Iran, but it's not clear that it makes any real difference to us -- most likely it doesn't unless we make something of it, which would be unprecedented.

The "reformers" are as much the establishment in Iran as the "conservatives" are, but the very idea of reform is likely to let loose all sorts of change, much of which has been percolating beneath the surface for years. How far this goes may depend on how hard the system cracks, if indeed it does at all. Still, at this point it's impossible to imagine an outcome where Iran's foreign policy budges much from its recent course. It might be easier for Obama to sell a rapprochement with an Iran led by Mousavi than Ahmadinejad, but the deal is likely to be the same. Moreover, such a deal depends more on Obama than on Iran -- for proof, just look at how Clinton and Bush failed to do anything with Iran's previous round of reformers.