My thoughts on Iran have been swirling all weekend. Broadly, I have been reflecting on the way this spectacle renews the lesson we seem to have to relearn periodically about the importance for us here in the 'City on the Hill' of managing our expectations for the rest world. Hard realities and so on.

If it is not clear yet, I suspect it will be clear by noon today (Monday) that the weekend's events have dealt a considerable public relations blow here at home to the Obama program of engagement with Iran, and potentially even to his broader vision of engagement toward 'the Muslim world' outlined last week. I don't believe the merits of that approach have been changed at all, but in terms of a swing of conventional and elite opinion on the question, I think Obama will be on his back foot starting Monday morning. I hope I am proved wrong about that, but I think it is likely that the narrative of a young president displaying hope and optimism only to be presented with a response such as this will be too much for a cynical media to pass up. Should that happen, it will be worth asking oursleves whether it had to be the case.

First a counterfactual: consider the impact a legitimate Ahmadinejad victory might have had. Would it have backlashed against the engagement initiaive as much as I expect the events that did transpire will? It is true that this is rather moot, as it appears such a victory was utterly out of the question. But had it appeared less clear that Ahmadinejad would lose (or conversely less likely that Mousavi was going to win, or at least force a run-off), would a legit Ahmadinejad win in fact have been a more desirable outcome for those of us hoping for engagement than what we have seen? On balance I think it would. Of course, we didn't know what was in store. But in retrospect, it appears to me that the spectacle of the 'green wave' served primarily to bring greater Western media and chatteringclass attention to Iran's elections than had a landslide Ahmadinejad victory been both expected and observed. Western hopes and expectations for major change in Iran were only heightened due that attention, and it seems that we have arrived at the worst of all possible outcomes: maximum international attention to a horrendous, anti-democratic spectacle of tyranny. (The coup language is curious, as a coup is something that happens to a paty in power, not that is done by one. This is an anti-constitutional -- depending on Iran's constitution -- act of tyranny.)

Greater attention would have magnified the effects in the West of a legitimate Ahmadinejad victory as well, of course. But I think that what we have witnessed lends a special kind of (let me be clear: public relations) rebuke to Obama's approach, an approach which I still unequivocally support.

Expectations games are very difficult to win (though the Republicans seem to have little problem winning them consistently).  I should make clear that I was not on the right side of my own 20/20-hindsight advice here. I was quite expectantly hopeful. (The 'expectant' part being key; simply having a preference and hoping for it to carry the day is of course part and parcel of any democratic process.) But I can say that as I observed optimism here rising, I made a point of considering what the consequences of raised hopes and heightened expectations in the West for this election might be, should the (in some quarters) hoped-for outcome not come to pass. I suspected it would be the standard fare from the usual suspects. I certainly didn't foresee a coup-in-reverse. But I did note, along with my rising expectations and foreboding about what they might entail, that I had absolutely no idea how much confidence to place in the transparency of any part of Iran's election system: vote, vote-count, reporting, official deferrence to results, etc.  So the question is, tomorrow morning are we looking at the usual carping from the usual quarters, as we might have had had Ahmadinejad won outright (even with raised expectations), or are we looking at a changed foreign-policy-opinion landscape? We'll know in a few hours.

Either way, given the above, and given the fact that a change in the office of president of Iran is in any case a rather less significant event than some might think or others wish it to be, it seems clear that this is a case of having to re-learn a tough lesson (manage expectations, including your own) the hard way.  We'll soon enough find out how hard that way turns out to be.