Some highlights:

Sarah Palin, no less, is now urging Obama to “declare war on Iran” to save his presidency. She’s not alone. Daniel Pipes, the conservative commentator, called a recent National Review column: “How to save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran.”

There’s nothing new in U.S. hawks reducing Iran to a nuclear abstraction, its 70 million citizens subsumed into a putative warhead, its civilization ignored and its historical grievances against the United States glossed over — all in the name of making Persia a U.S. electoral pawn and a threat that demands bombs.

But the war option remains unthinkable, a potential disaster for the United States and Israel. It’s therefore worth outlining, before the drumbeat intensifies in the run-up to the mid-term U.S. elections, 10 truths about Iran.

1.Iran’s hardliners thrive on isolation. The game-changing pursuit of dialogue with Iran is not incompatible with support of the Green movement; rather it complements that backing.

Obama must denounce the rape-and-repress post-election crackdown and speak out for Iranians’ right to peaceful protest even as he seeks to overcome through negotiation the poisonous U.S.-Iranian psychosis. Engagement brought us further in one year than axis-of-evil U.S. grandstanding did in seven.

As Andrew Parasiliti of the International Institute for Strategic Studies has said, “Engagement with Iran is a piece of the process for change in Iran — not a detriment to it.”

The one sure way to defeat the Green movement, frustrate Iranian youth, unite Iranians in patriotic defiance, reinforce the New Right, put Iran on a crash course to a bomb, and buttress the regime — as in 1980 — is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. As Gates has said, “There is no military option that does anything more than buy time” — and not much, at that.

7. The shifts since the June 12 elections are seismic. A vicious clampdown has estranged millions of Iranians from the regime, creating a situation not unlike Poland’s in the 1980s. This does not mean change is imminent. It does mean the theocracy faces a people who have seen through it. As the Iranian-Canadian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo of the University of Toronto told me, “Violence equals moral and political weakness.”

If restiveness spreads to the Labor movement, as in 1979, or the anger of the religious establishment in Qom escalates, all bets are off. Iran is far more volatile than a year ago. I doubt that it could manage a peaceful transition were Khamenei, 70, to die.

The West, with its historical debt to Iran, owes it to the Iranian people not to surrender to feel-good punitive impulses that will only undermine a centennial struggle for some form of representative government.

A post-zealous Iran that has no illusion about Islamism — been there, done that — is one of the most hopeful societies in the Middle East precisely because the struggle between God’s authority and the people’s is being played out daily. Most Iranians want normal relations with the world, above all.

10.Iran is the original Heartbreak Hotel. It crushes people with its tragedy. Since at least the 1930s it has veered between forced westernization (“westoxification” to its critics) and theocratic imposition, banning the hijab and then making it compulsory, reaching for pluralism and then crushing it, opening its society and then slamming it shut.

Now, in 2010, a reformist movement, often led by brave women, trying to chart a middle course — true to Iran’s Shiite faith but also to its republican instincts — has been bloodied before our eyes. Classical Shiism envisages secular governance on earth not the now bankrupted rule of a purported representative of the Prophet.

It is time. It is time for Iran to find the balance between faith and pluralism that has eluded it for a century.