Bush worried them. Obama doesn't.

Ralph Peters of the New York Post gives his sober assessment of Obama's reaction to Iran's election farce.

THE OBAMA EFFECT

It must have been the viewing angle: The despots who run Iran somehow missed the halo gracing President Obama during his recent sermon to the Muslim world.

The ruling mullahs' contemptuous handling of Iran's presidential election was their response to "the Cairo effect" announced a tad prematurely by the White House.

Our president's public flagellation of America only emboldened the junta in Tehran -- leaving Iran's power brokers more defiant, determined and dismissive than they've been in years.

And the strongest response Obama can muster to the blood in Tehran's streets is: "I am deeply troubled by the violence that I've been seeing on television." How bold, how manly, how inspiring . . .

Our president's speechwriters made the same mistake no end of diplomats and pundits made before them: They didn't pause to consider the enemy's viewpoint. Like Obama himself, they didn't bother trying to understand the mullahs' logic for acting as they do.

Obama believed that his rhetoric would change the strategic environment -- and his White House apostles wasted no time before declaring that his Cairo speech was responsible for Hezbollah's electoral setback in Lebanon a few days later.

Then administration spokespersons panted to take credit for the "inevitable" election of Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran. But the men who run Iran didn't play along: Every Basij (regime-thug) baton cracking a demonstrator's skull in Tehran is a -- distinctly clenched -- fist shoved in Obama's face.

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