‘Obama, Obama, either with us or with them’

That is not the chant I expected to hear today from Tehran. The Iranian opposition is continuing its very clever tactic of co-opting state-sanctioned protest events and turning them into anti-government protests. Today is the 30th anniversary of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and so opponents of the government joined in, and mixed in some “death to the dictator” chants along with the usual “death to the USA.”

But, as several outlets have noted, and as the YouTube video attests, some Iranians were calling on President Obama to help, in some fashion:

Another group of protesters chanted “We don’t want the atom bomb”:

My first thought was that these are provocateurs, planted by the Iranian government to discredit the opposition by making it look like the protesters were doing the U.S.’s bidding. Why would the protesters be explicitly tying themselves with the U.S. and its aims, when they’ve so scrupulously avoided doing so in the past? And to do it in such a way that echoes the George W. Bush formulation or “you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists?” And when a top opposition official, in Washington just a few days earlier, told the largely American audience exactly what they didn’t want to hear, according to Jackson Diehl’s op-ed in the Washington Post, wonderfully titled “Iran’s Unlovable Opposition.”

Ataollah Mohajerani, who has been a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi, came to Washington to address the annual conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The mostly pro-Israel crowd was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.

What they heard, instead, was a speech that started with a rehashing of U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup in Tehran and went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program. Mohajerani, who served as culture minister in the liberal Iranian government of Mohammed Khatemi in the 1990s, distanced himself from the current president’s denial of the Holocaust and remarked at one point that Iran “should not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.”

But he went on to assert, as per the current regime, that the countries seeking to freeze Iran’s nuclear program themselves possess nuclear weapons, as does Israel; that Israel had contracted to supply nuclear weapons to Iran’s former shah; and that Ahmadinejad’s threats to destroy Israel were no different than what Hillary Clinton had said about Iran during her presidential campaign. Asked whether Israel had a right to exist, he refused to respond.

So why would Iranians, on today of all days, say that Obama should help them? The folks at Tehran Bureau, the go-to site for English-language info on the opposition, are plugging the Obama video, so they think it’s legit, and I’m inclined to believe them.

So what gives? Any thoughts?