Here are three of the ten:

1. Impose and enforce the strongest sanctions. The U.S. should push other concerned countries to enforce targeted sanctions on the Iranian regime and its internal security organs; ban all foreign investment, loans and credits, subsidized trade, and refined petroleum exports to Iran; and deny visas to its officials.

2. Drop opposition to U.S. gasoline sanctions. Both houses of Congress voted by large bipartisan majorities to impose sanctions against firms that export refined petroleum products to Iran. Yet the White House is dragging its feet, arguing such sanctions will impede diplomatic efforts at the U.N., even though the U.N. is unlikely to approve crippling sanctions.

3. Target public diplomacy to expose the regime's human rights abuses. Such a campaign should document the abuses and aid victims, step up broadcasting and support for independent Iranian broadcasters outside the country to expose corruption of officials and the regime's aid to terrorists, and educate Iranians about genuine representative democracy.

That was then, this was from last Wednesday's New York Times:

The contrasts were vivid: Pro-government supporters chanted ''Death to America'' and stomped on U.S. flags Wednesday while not far away, hundreds of opposition protesters denounced Iran's leaders and appealed to America's president to choose sides.

''Obama, Obama, you are either with them, or with us,'' the anti-government protesters chanted in Farsi, in an amateur video clip widely circulated on the Internet.

And what was President Obama's reponse this time?

Knowing the opposition was planning to march, Mr. Obama issued his own statement the night before that instead chose to reach out to the regime. America, he said, "seeks a relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran based upon mutual interest and mutual respect. We do not interfere in Iran's internal affairs." He went on to list the Administration's various efforts to appease the regime. So far and on all counts, the mullahs have rebuffed these entreaties.

The President made no mention of democracy or reference to the opposition directly, though in the last paragraph he did allow that "the world continues to bear witness to [Iranian peoples'] powerful calls for justice."

The Wall Street Journal asks Barack Obama the question on all freedom-loving peoples' lips:

Is this what he meant when he talked, at the start of his Presidency, about "restoring U.S. moral leadership"?

Amir Taheri, writing in today's NY Post, offers some sober reminders about the murderous mullahs in Tehran.

Here's what the bad guys think of us over there:

According to the newspaper Kayhan, which reflects the views of the leadership in Tehran, the United States is "in a state of strategic desperation" in the Middle East and has no stomach for a serious confrontation with Iran.

An excerpt:

Did the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the subsequent holding of competitive elections in which many rival Iraqi Shiite parties took part, have any germinal influence on the astonishing events in Iran? Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media.

Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a "let's pretend" election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.

There are, no doubt, other determining factors as well. Contrary to the simplistic distinction between the "liberal urban" and the "conservative rural" that is made by so many glib commentators, Iran is a country where very rapid urbanization of a formerly rural population is being undergone, and all good Marxists ought to know that historically this has always been a moment pregnant with revolutionary discontent. In Saddam's Iraq, the possession of a satellite dish was punishable by death; everybody knows that the mullahs in Iran cannot enforce their own ban on informal media and unofficial transmission. And yet, precisely because they are so dense and so fanatical, they doom themselves to keep on trying. Every Iranian I know is now convinced that if this is not the end for the Khamenei system, it is at least the harbinger of the beginning of the end.

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