The media are full of breathless reports of an Iranian uprising. They love this story.

After election results from June 12 showed a landslide victory for hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, angry anti-establishment university students took to the streets. For the moment, their protests are surviving a brutal security crackdown.

But don’t take what you see on the evening news at face value. If you hope this is the Iranian Anti-Revolution, you shouldn’t hold your breath.

This is not the herald of a new age of moderation in Iran. In the end, the protests will flame out. Nothing will change. The Islamic Republic will roll on toward its goal of regional dominance and general mayhem in the name of Allah. It will keep supporting terror and pursuing nuclear weapons. There are several reasons this is true.

Perhaps the most interesting—but also least significant—is the fact that President Obama has firmly cast his vote for Ahmadinejad.

Iran’s protesters are begging for the American president to reject the election’s outcome. “Is he going to accept this result?” they asked a cnn reporter. “Because if he does, then we’re doomed.” These students are going to be disappointed.

From his first days in office, Obama has reached out to—and thus legitimized—the religious leaders and the radical president that Iranian intellectuals oppose. He addressed his conciliatory video greeting in March to “the Islamic Republic of Iran”—the first time ever that America recognized the ayatollahs as the official representatives of the Iranians. Last month he conceded that a theocratic Iran had the right to enrich uranium.

Having made such appeasing gestures so fundamental to his foreign policy, President Obama would be admitting their failure if he now undermined Iran’s religious establishment. He is effectively trapped by the support he has given to Iran’s radicals. Thus, where other national governments are condemning Tehran’s brutality against dissenters, the Obama administration has expressly refused to do so. It stops at saying it is “deeply troubled” by the violence and is “monitoring” the situation.

While President Obama’s message of democracy and change fits with the goals of Iran’s reformers, his policy of reaching out to Muslim leaders undermines those who seek that change. Obviously he doesn’t want to appear unsympathetic to the demonstrators. But he really can’t offer them anything more than the mildest encouragement if he still hopes to progress in his efforts to engage the mullahs. It’s almost painful to watch the president walk this fence. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly explained the president’s inaction this way: “We have to look at our own national interest too—nonproliferation is a very important priority in this administration.” In other words, to pursue negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear program (a fool’s errand), Obama mustn’t offend its leaders. Yesterday the president said U.S. policy toward Iran wouldn’t change no matter what the outcome of the election—nor, presumably, how brutal the suppression of dissent.

Any notion that “the Obama effect” is to be credited for the spasms of democratic protest in Iran is laughable—an exact inversion of reality. In truth, if there was a glimmer of a chance for Iran’s protesters to make a difference, it is flickering out, starved of the oxygen of American support, smothered by America’s engagement with the radicals who have ordered the beatings.

Ultimately, however, the influence of an American politician on this process is minimal compared to the forces within Iran’s government working against another revolution. This is the real reason we should expect no change in Iran.

For one, the election—like all Iranian elections—was a charade. This isn’t merely a question of whether or not votes were counted correctly, as European and American leaders disingenuously claim.

Iran is not a democracy—it is a theocratic republic. The religious leaders decide who can run for office and who can’t. “In practice,” American Thinker wrote, “a president of Iran is already chosen through a farce process of giving the voters a chance to elect one of the men hand-picked from the regime’s functionaries, as was the case with President Ahmadinejad.” Out of 470 candidates who entered the prescreening process, only four came through. Ahmadinejad’s main opponent, Mirhossein Mousavi—whom many seem to think would shepherd Iran into the peace-loving brotherhood of nations—has a history as a hardliner from the days when he was prime minister under the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Of course, the mullahs control more than just elections—they control everything. The president, whoever he may be, doesn’t create foreign policy; he is essentially a caretaker of domestic matters. Even then, everything he does is subject to approval by the ayatollah. Consider how Iran’s nuclear program has developed virtually uninterrupted through several presidencies, both “radical” and “moderate.”

Also important to consider is the likelihood that Iranian discontent with Ahmadinejad is highly exaggerated. Though many assume voting fraud, the fact is that the president remains very popular throughout most of the country. As George Friedman pointed out on Sunday, foreign reporters, diplomats and intelligence people are likeliest to talk with educated, English-speaking Iranians—those generally most favorable to the West and eager for a liberalization of the regime. Thus, the picture transmitted to the West is deeply skewed. Outside the professional classes, Ahmadinejad is heavily favored for his simple piety and respect of tradition, his fight against political corruption, and his desire to forge Iran into a strong power to make the nation secure. It is more plausible that he carried nearly two thirds of the vote thanks to his rural supporters than that there was vote tampering on such a massive scale as to hand him such a landslide victory.

Whatever the means, Ahmadinejad won big. “This election has made Ahmadinejad a powerful president, perhaps the most powerful in Iran since the revolution,” Friedman wrote.

Note the irony: Just as President Obama has turned his back on Iran’s dissenters so as not to jeopardize the prospect of working with Iran’s conservatives, President Ahmadinejad has less reason than ever to concede an inch.

For 17 years, our editor in chief has been drawing readers’ attention to Iran—its aim to seek undisputed leadership of the radical Islamic camp, and how this factors into its significant part in the unfolding of end-time biblical prophecies. Through most of those years, reports have percolated of Iran’s moderate youth movement preparing to take over. American leaders have kicked the Iran can down the road in hopes that its dissidents would muster the strength to overthrow the mullahs. But Gerald Flurry only became further convinced over time that Iran would grow more radical—eventually to fulfill the prophesied role of “king of the south” (Daniel 11:40). (Read his booklet The King of the South to understand this pivotal scripture.)

We stand by that prophecy today, even while protesters fill the streets of Tehran. In fact, once the smoke clears, we expect a newly galvanized Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As the New York Times wrote, his commanding election victory made him “the shrewd and ruthless front man for a clerical, military and political elite that is more unified and emboldened than at any time since the 1979 revolution.”

Ahmadinejad said as much himself. In response to those who have wondered whether in his second term he would be more moderate, he said, “It’s not true. I’m going to be more and more solid.”

Truly, this election powerfully refuted the notion that engagement and appeasement is the way to eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat. Yet the White House seems not to have learned that lesson—and is making the damage worse as a result.