[Gregory Scoblete is an associate editor at RealClearWorld.]

The recent protests in Iran have revealed deep fractures in the ruling elite - and I'm not talking about Iran. Closer to home, a debate has erupted over whether President Obama should be speaking out more forcefully on behalf of the protesters on the streets of Tehran, or whether his rhetorical restraint is a mark of wisdom. The debate has given the president's neoconservative critics a chance to kill two birds with one stone - politically wounding Obama and denigrating realism all at once.

At first blush, it seems odd that the critics to the President's right believe dubbing him a "realist" would be a term of opprobrium. After all, foreign policy realism is typically associated with Republicans, not Democrats. Its most famous devotees include President Nixon's Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, President George H. W. Bush, and Bush's National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft. Some of America's greatest foreign policy successes - the cleaving of China from the Soviet Union and the peaceful reunification of Germany, for example - were the product of realist statesmen.

Of course, there has never been a strictly "realist" administration, just as there has never been a strictly idealist one. The two schools are always in tension, often in the same administration and even in the same Commander in Chief.

But as the conservative criticism of Obama suggests, the constituency for realism inside the conservative movement and Republican circles appears to have waned considerably since its Kissingerian heyday.

Indeed, during the primaries, when President Obama admitted that he looked favorably on the foreign policy decisions of the George H. W. Bush administration, neoconservatives began sniffing a realist rat. In his willingness to speak frankly about America's past sins, to his desire to engage with Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, neoconservatives have been complaining that the president was discarding his predecessor's soaring rhetoric and trampling on "American exceptionalism."

But it was not until the protests in Iran erupted that the critical damn burst. President Obama quickly indicated that while he was "deeply troubled" by the election results, he had no desire to be seen as "meddling" in Iran's internal business. He has since sharpened his rhetoric, claiming to be "appalled" by the recent violence.

But the President's overall restraint is understandable, particularly when the outcome of the protests remains unclear, and an American endorsement could tar the protesters as Western stooges. Perhaps the president was chastened by America's less-than-stellar record of finessing Iran's internal politics, from the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mosaddeq, through President Carter's tone deaf support for the Shah as his regime reeled in revolutionary tumult . Whenever, and however, the dust settles in the Islamic Republic, the U.S. will still have serious business to attend to. Iran will still have a nuclear program. It will still have extensive ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, and it will still desire a larger geopolitical role in the Middle East.

Obama's reticence has not set well with neoconservatives. In the President's restraint they detected the putrid scents of foreign policy realism. And so they pounced.

Senator John McCain got the ball rolling by criticizing Obama during a TV interview."He should speak out that this is a corrupt, flawed sham of an election, and that the Iranian people have been deprived of their rights," Senator McCain argued."We support them in their struggle against a repressive, oppressive regime and they should not be subjected to four more years of Ahmadinejad and the radical Muslim clerics."

In the pages of the Washington Post, Robert Kagan (a former McCain advisor) went one better, accusing the president of secretly rooting for Ahmadinejad to crush the protesters so he could get on with the business of appeasing Iran."What Obama needs," wrote Kagan,"is a rapid return to peace and quiet in Iran, not continued ferment. His goal must be to deflate the opposition, not to encourage it." Kagan went on to ruefully note that as disturbing as Obama's betrayals are, it's"what ‘realism' is all about."

Columnist Jonah Goldberg urged the President to insert himself into Iran's democratic struggles with high-minded rhetoric. What was stopping Obama? Only realism, Goldberg wrote,"the worst thing" about the Republican Party and the root of Obama's rhetorical reluctance. Writing on the website of the neoconservative journal Commentary Magazine, Jonathan Tobin decried the Obama administration as - horror of horrors - the second term of George H. W. Bush...