It is certainly possible that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might actually have won a majority of Iranians' votes on Friday, as Flynt Leverett argues.  While the Tehran regime is deeply unpopular abroad, and not just in the West (the Islamic republic repeatedly loses elections in U.N. bodies), average Iranian voters may pay no more attention to weighty foreign policy concerns than do, say, average American voters.  

The pious and the simple still admire Ahmadinejad's simple piety.  Moreover, his administration did channel much of Iran's oil windfall into increases in pensions, government workers' pay, and small-bore projects, a variation on Franklin D. Roosevelt's breezy rebuttal of his critics--"tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect!"    

Still, the interior ministry's announcement of a landslide Ahmadinejad victory is widely seen as a fraud.  There are plenty of circumstantial reasons (Juan Cole enumerates many of them), and the widespread arrests of critics suggest a regime that cannot rely on transparent ballot counts to satisfy skeptics.   

Indeed, there are reports of Interior Ministry officials stepping forward to describe wholesale invention of election results.  

Certainly the passions erupting in street protests around Iran demonstrate that much of Iran can no longer abide the Islamic regime's suffocating grip; this election exercise has revealed unbridgeable chasms within Iranian society.

With reassuring certainty, Senator John McCain told viewers of Fox News that the election "really is a sham."  Disconcertingly, he added to his election analysis a stirring call to arms: "I hope that we will act." 

What the United States should do to "act" the former presidential nominee prudently left unsaid.  The last time the United States "acted" in Iran when democracy was challenged, as President Obama noted in Cairo, it orchestrated a royalist coup that entrenched the Pahlevi dictatorship for a quarter century.  

Vice President Joe Biden had it right -- while "there's some real doubt" about the Ahmadinejad victory, "our interests are the same before the election as after the election."  

The announced results may smell phony, but the change in U.S. policy toward Iran that Obama initiated this spring was never premised on a Jeffersonian democracy flourishing in Tehran. 

Baring its fangs today may further delegitimize the clerical regime at home and sow seeds of a regime crisis in the future, but Americans' first priority is to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program.  

Their next priority is to ensure Iran's oil and gas continue flowing into international markets.  Neither goal is advanced by hostile "action."  

On the contrary, it becomes easier to deal with another country's government on numerous issues, large and small, if one at least has formal diplomatic relations, no matter how chilly.

So Obama should let the electoral dust settle in Iran.  With the Tehran regime already reeling from the intensity of Iranians' outrage, U.S. bluster would be its godsend.  

Perhaps Obama might encourage Ban Ki-moon to offer the services of the United Nations election assistance unit to oversee a transparent count or a re-run election.  

In the event of tangible evidence of fraud--and of a sweeping crackdown on critics' civil and political rights--Obama should use America's newly won seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council to press for dispatch of a U.N. rapporteur to investigate.  

But U.S. pressures for an honest election and respect for political rights should be made multilaterally, through the U.N. track--where a wider coalition of nations can press the Islamic republic on respecting human rights with far more credibility than Washington can alone.  

Nothing has changed in the past week that should deter Obama from dealing directly with Tehran on core bilateral concerns.    

     JeffreyLaurenti@MaximsNews.com