Just as terms such as left and right are often useless labels in today's politics, terms such as alliance are not as useful as they once were before the end of World War 2. There are only two nations in the world that can be allies of the United States rather than junior partners (like European states) or client states (like many states in the global South, especially much of the Middle East, and also Japan): China and Russia. But are they US allies? While neither is hostile to Washington and Chinese and US economies are mutually dependent on each other, even they are not regarded as allies of the United States in a clear and consistent fashion. How they are treated by Washington affects how they conduct themselves toward it. The same goes for lesser powers, such as Iran, which cannot hope to become an ally of the United States in the true sense of the word.
Some of Iran's power elite, like Khatami and Rafsanjani, nevertheless bend to US demands much more readily than other factions, which is the reason why the Western press call them "moderates" and other names that are essentially codewords for degrees of willingness to subordinate their nation's and region's interests to Washington's. Khatami and Rafsanjani's factions probably think of Hamas, Hizballah, etc. as political and financial albatrosses around their necks, and they would be rather happy to say sayonara to them (which was essentially the main content of their overtures to Washington). Those who are called "hard-liners" are not quite like them, for they are often religiously, politically, and economically attached to such causes as well as their nation's sovereignty.
But our task is not to make all factions of Iran's power elite refuse to make Iran a client state. It's up to the Iranian people to do so if they wish. Our task, instead, is to stop the US-led campaign of economic sanctions, covert actions, and "democracy assistance."
> Also I agree with you when you say to Doug that 'leftist' in this context is
> not necessarily good (after all the 'leftists' in the Irish republican
> movement, the 'Officials' were those that favoured collaboration with
> British imperialism). It is just that the pro-western outlook of the Iranian
> leftists (descendants of Tudeh) does not necessarily imply that the current
> regime's populism is preferable.
In my view, the people of Iran were correct to have voted for Khatami and Ahmadinejad successively, thinking that they were the best possible choices in the presidential elections in which they ran respectively. Those who think that Iranians made wrong choices need to win over Iranians, not me, to their views, since I don't get to vote in Iranian elections.
> As for killing leftists, I think most would agree that executing your
> political opponents should demand a high threshold of justification, which
> the Iranian regime has not met.
There is no question that Iran's government executed many leftists -- mostly during the Iran-Iraq War, especially when they faced the Mojahedin's uprising at the same time -- which it should _not_ have. But that fact has little relevance to what is to be done _today_. We live with governments which have killed more leftists than Iran's government -- including the US government, its most important allies and client states, and its former enemies such as the governments of China and Russia -- so we can very well live with the government of Iran, too. What we need is realism, for what we need to advocate for is normalization of relations between governments that have killed leftists in the countries a majority of whose publics do not give a damn about fates of leftists one way or another. -- Yoshie