WASHINGTON (Albert R. Hunt, Bloomberg News) June 29, 2009 — President Barack Obama, in dealing with Iran, brings some expertise as important as his lack of foreign policy experience: a background in Chicago politics.

The big picture in Iran, even more than a bottom-up street insurgency, is the clash of leading political and clerical figures.

“We are seeing a real division in Iran’s establishment,” says William Quandt, a University of Virginia professor who was a Carter administration expert on Iran during that nation’s revolution 30 years ago.

Among top Obama administration officials and other foreign policy experts there is some consensus: We will never know who actually won the June 12 election; Iran’s leadership is weaker than imagined; the outcome is uncertain; and there will be far more difficult policy choices than the superficial debate today over whether Mr. Obama’s rhetoric and support for Iranian democracy have been tough enough.

Almost nobody believes the Iranian declaration that the election was a lopsided win for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It is conceivable he captured a slim majority or a plurality. In what was considered a pretty legitimate election four years earlier, he won decisively, beating one of the original revolutionaries, the former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

That Mr. Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, felt it necessary to immediately claim a landslide victory illustrates what a fragile hold these hard-liners have.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, is convinced this signals “the beginning of the end for the Iranian equivalent of the neocons, the radical ayatollahs who see the world as a battle between good and evil.”

How soon? Mr. Brzezinski and like-minded analysts aren’t sure. “The people in the big cities in Iran are as European as Turkey; they may not be quite strong enough yet to come out on top,” he said.

Madeleine K. Albright, a former Brzezinski associate and subsequent secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, agrees. “It’s very hard to see the exact trajectory at the moment,” she said. “It certainly looks as though the regime will retain control. They are being totally brutal; on the other hand, I think the demonstrations will continue.”

So will the political struggle, which is on two different levels. One is between the two factions of the 1978-79 revolution — one led by Ayatollah Khamenei, the other by Mr. Rafsanjani, a cunning and controversial figure.

There certainly is ideology and theology in the mix, although some of the “acrimony” is analogous to the late Wallace Stanley Sayre’s observation that academic politics is so bitter because “so little is at stake.”

Here’s where understanding politics, Chicago style, comes in: it’s about survival. If Mr. Ahmadinejad loses, Mr. Rafsanjani is more empowered. One of Mr. Rafsanjani’s posts is as head of the Assembly of Experts, whose primary function is to choose, or replace, the supreme leader.

If Mr. Rafsanjani — who was attacked for corruption in this election even though he wasn’t on the ballot — loses, he may be in peril.

The second struggle is generational. Both sides invoke the slogans and tactics of the campaign used to overthrow the hated shah. Some three-quarters of Iranians were born in the last 30 years and have experienced none of those moments.

All of which makes the American debate over whether Mr. Obama has been tough enough seem sophomoric. The White House claim that the president has been consistent is also ridiculous. He has hardened his position both as a response to political pressure, from some Democrats as well as Republicans, and as circumstances got worse after the June 12 election.

Critics, led by Senator John McCain and some neoconservatives, charge that a stronger American response would hearten the freedom-loving forces in Iran and hasten change. That simply isn’t credible, most experts say. Moreover, if the United States encourages protests and they are violently put down, what does the U.S. government then do? Use force in another Muslim land?

Dr. Albright notes the parallels to the popular uprisings against Communist regimes a half-century ago. “The administration in the 1950s kept saying to the Hungarian people, ‘We will help you if you rise up.’ And then we didn’t,” she said. “Czechoslovakia in 1968.”

Liz Cheney — a top adviser to her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — complains about Mr. Obama that “it shouldn’t have taken him so long to express the outrage.” A quarter-century ago, Mr. Cheney twice voted against sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa. So much for outrage.

Much more crucial will be the decisions Mr. Obama has to make in the months ahead. Even if some compromise is reached, it’s unlikely that the “moderates” or “reformers” will be eager to deal with the long-reviled Americans. Mr. Obama seems to have made impressive strides in changing Muslims’ perceptions; there’s still a way to go.

And whatever the necessity of engaging the hard-liners on the nuclear or other issues, as Mr. Obama has pledged, domestic politics will make this almost impossible if the Iranian regime retains power violently.

The context isn’t encouraging. For decades, U.S.-Iranian relations have been consistently botched on both sides.

In the 1980s, during the bloody Iran-Iraq war, the United States — after dispatching an envoy named Donald Rumsfeld — not so subtly sided with Saddam Hussein, who used chemical and biological warfare to slaughter Iranians. That memory is more vivid to many in Iran than is the 1978-79 revolution.

A dozen years ago, when the Iranians elected a comparative moderate, Mohammad Khatami, the Clinton administration extended olive branches.

Dr. Albright gave a conciliatory speech and tried to cooperate at the United Nations. A visa was granted for Iranian wrestlers, and import bans on caviar and rugs were lifted.

The Iranians either ignored or didn’t pick up on those signals, and relations deteriorated.

The pressure by Tehran thugs may succeed in the short term. A permanent change, however, is taking place in Iran. The United States and Iran, the most important Muslim geopolitical power in the region, can ill afford to botch it again.