[Why is it that Iran benefits from all our meddling in Arab countries, while China gobbles-up oil and gas rights as a result of our military softening-up operations in Asia? Is this the original plan, or just the outcome of so much idiocy in high places?]

Iran Basks in Unrest of Arab World

By JOHN VINOCUR

Through three months of Arab revolt against autocratic leaders, it’s become commonplace to say that the only clear strategic winner from the changes so far is Iran, supposedly picking up windfall political fruit as if sitting in an armchair.

Condensed, the argument goes like this: There has been only profit for Iran from the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, who represented an Arab bulwark against Tehran’s nuclear weapons ambitions and the mullahs’ allies, Hezbollah and Hamas. Conversely, and beyond its hopes for democracy in the Middle East, the United States and some of its Western friends have reaped potential grief in the destabilization their old regional power relationships.

On the ides of March 2011, that assessment appears incomplete and almost mild. Rather, there’s a developing sense of foreboding.

Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi has increasingly real chances of putting down the rebellion against him in Libya. Before his boss could try to paper over what he said last week,James R. Clapper Jr., President Barack Obama’s director of national intelligence, testified before Congress that the dictator’s forces “will prevail” in the long term.

Apart from twisting the neck of the theories of inexorable popular rage certain to engulf all the region’s tyrants (Just you wait, Tehran!), this shard of very possible truth places the West’s hesitant, stuttering position on Libya parallel to its halting response to the threat of Iranian nukes — and reassures Iran’s leaders of their wisdom in moving to crush their own protesters.

A second naïve premise is also collapsing.

It was the Pollyanna-ish (and calming) assumption of some analysts that while pocketing the disarray from the Arab upheaval, Iran was too clever to meddle in creating more of it. Now, for the first time, we’re told this isn’t so.

Over the weekend, after a visit to Bahrain, home port of the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet just across the Gulf from Iran, reporters on the airplane of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates were informed by an unnamed senior defense official that U.S. intelligence had evidence Iran was working to persuade the hard-line Shiite opposition in Bahrain to reject the government’s offer of a political dialogue.

This account of active Iranian troublemaking in Bahrain, a country of basic strategic importance to America, is significant. Add to that a surge of new notions of Western impotence — plus an emboldened Iran — if the Libyan colonel prevails.

And this: Last month, Britain provided a new urgency in the assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons timetable. Defense Minister Liam Fox has said “it is entirely possible” that Iran could produce a nuke in 2012.

So what to do? No decisive response on Iran, the ultimate Middle Eastern issue, is coming from Western capitals.

Their lack of focus on it, their nervousness about linking the Arab revolts with Iran through urging young Arab democracies to back Iran’s protest movement, is striking. Indeed, there’s a real possibility of new, coalition-of-the-willing sanctions based on the Iranian regime’s human rights violations. But they may not be backed by enough Western will to nullify a statement by the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, that the possibility of new sanctions “has been exhausted.”

This generalized timidity is not escaping attention. Bernard Kouchner, the former French foreign minister, put his finger on it in a conversation last week.

He said, “We’ve got to ask young Arabs to extend their hands” to their Iranian counterparts challenging the mullahs. “The French government should propose it. The question of Iran and the Arab revolt has not been joined as one.”

In Washington, Senator Lindsey Graham was part of a bipartisan group of senators pressing the administration to make its position clear on Chinese energy and banking firms the group named as apparent violators of U.S. sanctions regulations on Iran.

Members of the group have stressed that there was only a single case of sanctions being imposed by presidential order in the 15 years such power has been available to the White House. Mr. Graham told me that if there was no reaction soon, Congress should start oversight hearings on the enforcement of U.S. sanctions — a potential political embarrassment to Mr. Obama.

Senator John Kyl, part of the same group of Republicans and Democrats, accused the administration of failing to go beyond “the first grade” level in assisting the Iranian opposition in the manner the United States had helped Poland’s Solidarity protesters in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The truth is, the United States, and allies like Britain and France, have been extremely wary in expressing just what kind of democracy they would like to emerge in Egypt and Tunisia, and how the voices of those countries might support their counterparts’ struggle in Iran and blunt the mullahs’ drive toward nuclear confrontation.

Cynically, Western governments can dismiss such boldness as hasty, futile or insufficiently realpolitik. But it is supported by a new and still unaccustomed kind of democratic reality:

Without fanfare, Tunisia’s government on Saturday refused to authorize three new Islamist parties — citing a constitutional requirement that political organizations pledge rejection of all forms of violence, fanaticism and discrimination.