Does he know he knows not and can be taught? Or, does he know not that he knows not?

http://tinyurl.com/m2wr7x
Obama's Persian Tutorial The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets. By FOUAD AJAMI
President Barack Obama did not "lose" Iran. This is not a Jimmy Carter moment. But the foreign-policy education of America's 44th president has just begun...inserting himself in a raging civil war over Islam itself. An Iranian theocratic regime had launched a bid for dominion in its region; Mr. Obama offered it an olive branch and waited for it to "unclench" its fist...It was an odd, deeply conflicted message from Mr. Obama....He would entice the crowds, yet assure the autocrats that the "diplomacy of freedom"...is dead and buried. ...rulers in Tehran and Damascus...were quick to take the measure of the new steward...He had come to "engage" them. Gone was the hope of transforming these regimes or making them pay for their transgressions....Iran had never wanted an opening to the U.S. For...three decades, the custodians...have had precisely the level of enmity toward the U.S. they have wanted ... Iran's rulers have made their way in the world with relative ease....The Cold War and oil bailed them out. So did the false hope that the revolution would mellow and make its peace with the world.
Mr. Obama may believe that his offer to Iran is a break...nothing could be further from the truth. In 1989, in his inaugural, George H.W. Bush extended an offer to Iran: "Good will begets good will," he said. A decade later, in a typically Clintonian spirit of penance and contrition, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright came forth with a full apology for America's role in the 1953 coup...Iran's rulers scoffed....they were in no need of opening it to outsiders....Selective, targeted deeds of terror, and oil income, enabled them to hold their regime intact. There is ...the impact of three decades of zeal and indoctrination....Ahmadinejad -- a son of the...revolutionary order,... austere and indifferent to outsiders, an Iranian Everyman with badly fitting clothes and white socks -- was up for re-election.... There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad's ...populism at home and defiance abroad,...the country's nuclear quest is a "closed file," settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil....the Iranian revolutionaries, it has to be conceded, have built a formidable state. The men who emerged out of a cruel and bloody struggle over their country's identity and spoils are a tenacious, merciless breed. ...capacity for repression is fearsome....ambivalence at the heart of the Obama diplomacy about freedom has not served American policy well in this crisis. We had tried to "cheat" -- an opening to the regime with an obligatory wink to those who took to the streets appalled by their rulers' cynicism and utter disregard for their people's intelligence and common sense -- and we were caught at it. Mr. Obama's statement that "the difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as had been advertised" put on cruel display the administration's incoherence. ...
Mr. Obama will...acknowledge the "foreignness" of foreign lands. His breezy self-assurance has been put on notice.... believed its own rhetoric that the pro-Western March 14 coalition in Lebanon had ridden Mr. Obama's coattails to an electoral victory. (...it expected similar vindication in Iran.)
...the claim about Lebanon was hollow and reflected little understanding of the forces at play...settled by Lebanese rules, and by the push and pull of Saudi and Syrian and Iranian interests in Lebanon.
Mr. Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo did not reshape the Islamic landscape. ...The earth did not move,... countless people puzzled by the presumption of the entire exercise, an outsider walking into sacred matters of their faith....there was unease that so complicated an ideological and cultural terrain could be approached with such ease and haste.
Days into his presidency,...Obama had spoken of his desire to restore to America's relation with the Muslim world the respect and mutual interest that had existed 30 or 20 years earlier.... the time span he was referring to, his golden age, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American standoff with Libya, the fall of Beirut to the forces of terror, and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Liberal opinion would have howled had this history been offered by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama was granted a waiver. Little more than three decades ago, Jimmy Carter,...convinced that what had come before him could be annulled and wished away, called on the nation to shed its "inordinate fear of communism," ... The Soviet answer to that brave, new world was the invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979. ...Carter would try an atonement in the last year of his presidency. He would pose as a born-again hawk. It was too late in the hour for such redemption. It would take another standard-bearer, Ronald Reagan, to see that great struggle to victory. Iran's ordeal and its ways shattered the Carter presidency. President Obama's Persian tutorial has just begun.