Readers of this newspaper may remember our campaign two years ago on behalf of a brave Iranian intellectual and journalist, Akbar Ganji. In the summer of 2005, Mr. Ganji was openly defying Iran’s supreme leader on a hunger strike while in Evin prison and later at a nearby hospital.

Initially arrested for attending a reform conference in Berlin, Germany in 2005, Mr. Ganji became a symbol of the Iranian people’s aspirations as the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, assumed his limited power. Indeed, it was Mr. Ganji who called the election that led to the former Tehran mayor’s ascendancy a farce, urging fellow citizens to boycott the polls, that got him re-arrested while he was on a medical furlough.

That arrest led Mr. Ganji to begin his hunger strike, a cause that briefly united President Bush with the far academic left who eventually drafted an open letter calling for his release.

Early on, however, in June 2005 and July 2005, Mr. Ganji had few friends on the left. When Kofi Annan was asked about Mr. Ganji, the U.N. secretary general said he didn’t know enough to comment. Indeed, some of his new allies in the universities were busy explaining the “election” of Mr. Ahmadinejad to the American public and trying their best to knock down stories about the new president’s role as an interrogator of American hostages in 1979 and 1980.

It’s worth bringing this up now because Mr. Ganji has gone out of his way during his stay in the Western hemisphere to distance himself from any and all things neoconservative. When I interviewed him before he came to New York in 2006, he said he would only meet with Mr. Bush, the first world leader to call for his release from Evin Prison, to tell him he did not want him to bomb his country.

In his latest open letter to the U.N. secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, he is joined by more than 300 academics and intellectuals, many of whom believe that President Bush is as much a danger to the open society as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

It’s understandable that Mr. Ganji, who hopes to return to Iran, would distance himself from the American president and his political supporters. After all, the Iranian authorities appear willing to arrest and interrogate anyone who is even faintly associated with the conspiracy for a non-violent revolution, a cause Mr. Ganji has owned since he enumerated the principles of civic resistance in his two jailhouse manifestos.

But reading the first quarter of Mr. Ganji’s letter, I worry if this dissident’s distancing has gone too far. He writes, “Even speaking about ‘the possibility’ of a military attack on Iran makes things extremely difficult for human rights and pro-democracy activists in Iran.”

It’s true that a closed regime like the Islamic Republic of Iran will use the pretext of an external enemy to justify internal repression. No one should be gullible enough to believe that if a military strike is necessary in Iran, it would benefit those Iranians demanding Western political rights.

But let’s be honest, the Mullahs don’t really need a pretext to imprison, torture, and murder those, like Mr. Ganji, who demand an open society in Iran. The chain of murders of intellectuals that Mr. Ganji wrote about in 1999 occurred during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

When the Basij cracked down on the July 9, 1999, demonstrations at Tehran University, this was at the beginning of President Clinton’s outreach to the “reformist” president, Mohammed Khatami. Mr. Ganji was imprisoned in 2000 while this entente was in full swing. While the plight of dissidents in Iran has worsened in the last two years, the primary cause of Iran’s political and cultural suffocation are those orchestrating the suffocation.

More important, dissidents like Mr. Ganji should be aware that a nuclear-armed Iran will not lead the tormentors of dissidents to end their repression. In all likelihood it will embolden the current regime to further its support for terrorism. As important as the plight of Iranian dissidents should be for all Western governments, preventing the Islamic Republic from attaining an A-bomb today is a more pressing concern.

Mr. Ganji says the very existence of a $75 million annual fund for Iranian democrats also contributes to the recent crackdowns in Iran, making it easy for the Mullahs to attack the opposition with impunity. Mr. Ganji also writes that the money that has been disbursed by the democracy fund has gone to American institutions that do not get to authentic activists in the country.

I asked Scott Carpenter, who was the Bush administration’s point man for the democracy fund until he left the State Department this summer, what he thought of Mr. Ganji’s letter. In an E-mail response he said, “The problem Akbar has is that he believes that international pressure through the U.N. is the best hope for change but he knows in his heart of hearts that only the U.S. can compel the U.N. to act.” What Mr. Carpenter did not say is that America cannot pin all of its hopes on Mr. Ganji’s non-violent liberal-revolution. At a certain point, our country will probably have to explode the facilities where Iranian engineers enrich uranium. For the sake of Iraq, American soldiers should continue to make war on Iran’s terror network in Iraq.

As someone who wants Mr. Ganji’s movement to succeed, I wish I could say that the American government should do everything it can to help Iranian liberals. I can’t however. A tragedy of the times is that the short term interests of one of Iran’s greatest democrats no longer aligns with those of the world’s oldest democracies.