If Rep. Dana Rohrabacher were president here’s how he’d handle the situation in Iran: Talk tough to Iran’s leaders and covertly help the rebels.

It’s the way President Reagan won the Cold War, he said.

“Basically we’ve got a situation where we have stood back for a long time and if we’d helped the people of Iran we could have eliminated the mullah regime a long time ago,” Rohrabacher said. “Whether it was [Presidents Bush or Obama] we have refrained from actively supporting the opposition groups in Iran and it’s gotten so bad that even without any help from us the people of Iran are now trying to break the chains.”

The congressman has no patience for those who argue that Obama is taking a judicious approach to Iran’s upheaval.  Conservative commentator George Will this weekend discounted GOP criticism that Obama is not forceful enough in his comments about Iran.

“It’s a stupid argument. It’s cowardice,” Rohrabacher said. “The mullahs know damned well that it’s their corruption, incompetence and tyranny that are causing the population to go against them. The same thing was said about the Cold War, that it will be taken as a sign of belligerence and it will be used by the communist bosses against us. I’m very proud Ronald Reagan went to the Berlin Wall and said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev tear down that wall,’ and he didn’t say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, that wall’s none of our business.'”

Rohrabacher extended his analogy to the Solidarity movement in Poland when the U.S. helped the dockworkers shrug off the Soviet Union.

“We provided the shipyard workers striking against the communist authorities in Poland with Xerox machines and ways to communicate with each other,” he said. “We covertly provided less than weapons but more than just rhetoric, and we should be doing the same with the people of Iran.”

He noted that there are many ethnic groups, like the Kurds, who might rise up against the Persians in Iran if the U.S. emboldened them.

He’s not knocking Obama just for purely partisan sport. Rohrabacher, a fierce critic of China’s totalitarian governments and human rights abuses, acknowledged how he disagreed with how President Bush 41 appeased the Chinese after the notorious Tiananmen Square slaughter in 1989.

Imam Sayed Moustafa al-Qazwini of the Islamic Educational Center of Orange County in Costa Mesa disagreed with Rohrabacher, though, on how to help along the reform movement in Iran. Al-Qazwini, who studied in seminary in Iran for seven years, said the problem with Rohrabacher’s Cold War strategy is that most people in the Muslim world distrust Americans and wouldn’t be eager for their help.

“It is unwise to do this. Whenever the U.S. intervenes in the Middle East it fails,” he said. “Especially in Iran. They don’t trust Americans. That would take many ages for America to restore credibility in the Middle East. It would probably take three decades.”

Al-Qazwini sees what’s happening in Iran as a debate that has gone on since the 1979 Revolution.

“Not everyone agreed with theocracy at that time,” he said. “I could say the majority of them, but not all of them. Maybe 60 to 70 percent. People aspired to democracy, they aspired to be free because they were under the oppressive regime of the Shah of Iran. Many of their dreams have not been fulfilled over the last 30 years and the new generation — 70 percent of the people of Iran are under the age of 30 now — and they really look forward to a type of government that provides freedom, real democracy, job opportunities and openness to the rest of the world.”

Surprisingly, Al-Qazwini thinks Iran is one of the more progressive countries in the Muslim world.

“In my opinion, being an Iraqi who lived in Iran and who has traveled widely in the Muslim and Arab world, when I compare Iran to other countries there is a lot of freedom in Iran compared to Saudi Arabia or Egypt. The proof is that people are allowed to go into the streets and chant anti-government slogans. There’s free press in Iran, there are more women in the Iranian parliament than any other parliament in the Middle East … They demand more democracy, more freedom, more reforms.”

That’s pretty sad, though. As the Iranian government cracks down on the protesters they are reportedly gunning down their own people and arresting relatives of high-ranking leaders who are critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Furthermore, there are reports the government is shutting down cell phone use and Internet access. How could it get worse?

The main reasons the re-election of Ahmadinejad has touched off such massive protests and support of his challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, who is not exactly a reformer if you consider his hardliner roots, involve high unemployment, a battered economy and isolation from the West and much of the secular world, Al-Qazwini said.

As a native Chicagoan, I can relate. Tip O’Neill’s old saying, “all politics are local,” is true. Pick up the garbage, fix the potholes, trim those trees, and make sure the schools and economy work and you’ll never sweat re-election. It’s as true in Chicago as it is in Iran. But then so are rigged elections.

Ahmadinejad’s problem is he’s all talk and no action.

“He’s better known for his rhetoric than actually producing anything,” Al-Qazwini said. “It’s all rhetoric and empty promises. He didn’t pay attention to the domestic problems, the rising rates of unemployment, inflation. He didn’t do anything. The only thing he’s well-known for is threatening Israel, denying the Holocaust, and Iran won’t benefit from that. It will just put more pressure on Iran.”

Al-Qazwini’s well aware that Mousavi, the insider, isn’t going to provide substantial change to Iran even if his Quixotic crusade to take over succeeds. And it’s not just his ties to the establishment that prevents that — it’s the very power structure of Iran in itself that is the main obstacle. The president answers to the supreme leader who ultimately can answer to a “council of experts,” of esteemed ayatollahs. So who’s really in charge? It’s elusive.

“We would hope that Khamenei would pay attention to what’s going on in the streets of Tehran, but I think they’re resorting to crushing the opposition and using violence against protesters than just listening to them,” he said. “This is a very dangerous trend. In the long run they are masters in quelling and crushing the opposition.”

Al-Qazwini noted the country’s leaders did the same thing the last time there was an uprising in 1999.

They may have done it again. Reports from Iran Tuesday indicated the protests are fading.

“This is a moment of opportunity, and if it passes and we lose the chance to solve our confrontation with Iran in a peaceful way then shame on us and shame on our leaders,” Rohrabacher said. Rohrabacher is a ranking member of the Oversight Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Al-Qazwini is an Imam who has lived in Iran. Both have some expertise and divergent opinions on these uprisings. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who’s more convincing.

But I think in the long run the Iranian people will chase these dictatorial leaders from their perches. The globalization of the world via the Internet will make it impossible to sustain an ancient, isolationist dictatorship. Ahmadinejad and Khamenei might win this battle but they will lose the war.

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