Replies

All I can do in response is present the facts.
President Bush's policy was to criticize Ahmadinejad and support the protesters.
Ahmadinejad's response has been to criticize the US president.
The protests have increased.
Ahmadinejad's support has decreased.

You appear to find Bush's policy had an effect of weakening Iranians' support for Ahmadinejad, increasing protests against him and the clerical regime, or both. I doubt it.

No in my last post as one can see above in bold, I took the approach to simply lay out the facts and let one come to their own conclusion.

More likely the reasons are simply thuggery, authoritarianism, theocracy too harsh even for many Muslims, and obvious election fraud with a bad economy in the background.

...and at the very least a U.S. president supporting the Iranian people and their rejection of the tyrant Ahmadinejad can't hurt and may help.

Do you still think that a U.S. President who vocally supports the Iranian people and their defense of their unalienable rights, will cause the Iranian people to then reject that U.S. President, reject their unalienable rights and switch their support back over to the tyrant Ahmadinejad?

I don't.

However, your approach does have the virtue of looking at things empirically.

No, human nature and experience lead me to my point-of-view. Your approach appears at least from your posts to be derived from nothing specifically stated.

One of the fundamentals of the Iranian state is hostility toward the West in general and the US and UK in particular. Whatever the opinions of ordinary Iranians, ultimate power resides with the theocracy, the Guardian Council and Supreme Leader, who are not subject to popular election. They are the custodians of Iran's nasty revolutionary principles and are especially unlikely to allow a political outcome that contradicts the basic tenets of the Islamic Republic. For them to reject a fraudulent election is doable. To accept a president embraced by the US would be harder. Supporting their right as citizens to form a representative government in a fair election can't hurt. But the most feasible way for them to do it is profess allegiance to Islam and the legacy of Khomeini, which of course reformers interpret selectively, but to accept a US embrace would be jumping the shark for them. Plus, we're not going to do a military humanitarian intervention in Iran, so we ought not egg Iranians on too much.