And though Obama couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge McCain’s influence, or even that his script has changed at all as events have unfolded, it’s clear Obama has come around to a darker view of Iran’s rulers. Just as Obama was hilariously reluctant to concede that he might have been wrong to oppose the military surge in Iraq in 2006, he now insists that his statements have been utterly consistent. Yet his statements haven’t been consistent for the good and understandable reason that the White House is trying to thread an unthreadable needle. No one doubts that the president wants to condemn the crackdown in Tehran, yet he’s also hoping to cut a deal with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The trouble is that Obama fundamentally misreads the Islamic Republic, just as he once misread Iraq and Afghanistan. To his credit, however, the president eventually reversed course on both fronts, without ever saying so. On Iraq, he retained many of the architects of George W. Bush’s post-surge strategy. In Afghanistan, he abandoned early efforts to “lower our sights” in favor of a robust expansion of the American role in strengthening the country’s security forces, winning him praise from his erstwhile neoconservative enemies. Slowly, the president’s embrace of crabbed realism is coming undone.