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"Ok, let’s look at it a different way. Let’s say you are America and you want to encourage the Iranians to have another election because you think the results are corrupt. Considering that power rests solely in the hands of the mullah ruling class, do you think a resolution passed by the US House of Representatives will further or hinder that cause?"

The Mullah's are eventually going to lose this fight. It may not be this time, but it will certainly be the next. Do you want to be on the winning side, or the losing side?

If we stand with the young and the professionals, they'll remember that when they're in power. Just like the Islamic fundamentalists remembered that we stood (at least for a little while) with the Shah. Look how that turned out.

With all due respect, you are contradicting yourself. The very fact that we picked someone to "stand with" in the first place wss the source of the original problem. Had we let Mossadeq remain in power, for example, Iran might now be a vibrant democracy and friend to the U.S. As with domestic policy, you can't solve the problems created by intervention with more intervention. The best solution is to get out of the way and let the Iranians create the own revolution.

Do you want to be on the winning side, or the losing side?

I don't want to be on either "side." We picked sides in Iran enough already. First, we picked the Shah. That was the losing side. Then we picked the other side in the Iran / Iraq war. That didn't end up working to our advantage, either.

If we never would have taken a side in Iran in the first place, perhaps their "revolution" in the early 80s would have been quite different. It might have taken place later, but maybe it would have produced a democracy instead of an oligarchy. I'm hopeful that whatever is going on now leads to that result, even if it is 30 years overdue. And I have zero confidence that any resolution our House passes is going to do anything to make a real democracy more likely there.