Tree huggers and friends of the whales are busy offering sound advice to the president: “Too bad there were people killed in the streets. But eventually you must re-engage Iran.”

Now it’s Michael Axworthy’s turn. Axworthy is former head of the Iran Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, author of the book, Iran Empire of the Mind, and now head of the Iranian studies program at Exeter University. Writing in the Independent, he advocates engagement and says:

The next steps — as they would have been with a government led by Mousavi — will be to develop existing contacts over Afghanistan and Iraq, and to test the Iranians’ readiness to discuss the nuclear problem realistically in face-to-face talks with senior US representatives. Such moves would in themselves be a challenge to the Iranian leadership: a challenge to enter the real world (at least in this respect) or face the consequences.

Axworthy is not blind to the brutality of the regime, he is not trying to excuse the fraud, and he is certainly not dismissing the challenge Iran poses to diplomacy. Nevertheless, he seems to assume that we still do not have a full assessment of Iran’s readiness to discuss the nuclear problem; or that we do not know Iran’s real posture in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The problem with this assessment is not that it is naive or apologetic about evil. It is the assumption that there is a deal to be had on those issues with this regime — meaning we can find common ground with them. If anything should have been learned in the last two weeks, it is precisely the opposite. Axworthy may be right that the military option is not realistic; but that does not make negotiation “still the only real option.” There’s political isolation and help for the opposition to consider. It’s a path we never tried, and after what we’ve seen in Iran over the past two weeks, it’s high time we gave those a shot.