On to Iran!

...As one think-tanker (now a senior official in the Bush administration) remarked offhandedly, it was not wise to underscore probable Iranian complicity in the Khobar bombing for fear of derailing Khatami's reform movement and the "thaw" in U.S.-Iranian relations...

...the first major one, in February 1990, terrified the clergy, leading to the creation of special anti-riot units within the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij, an increasingly thuggish paramilitary force...

...Also, if the clerics could get Americans to bomb Taliban leaders they hate, this again seems most sensible and sound—a bit like getting Washington to give you anti-tank missiles in exchange for liberating American hostages whom your foreign proxies kidnapped...

...And the clerics have reason to be scared of their own flock...

...They don't require invisibility—their patronage of Hezbollah and Imad Mughniyah was no secret when they were blowing us to bits in Lebanon in the 1980s...

...In the war against the Taliban, the clerics actually gave us little to nothing...

...Ali Khamenei and Mohammad Khatami both made breathtaking, inspiring speeches about the Israeli retreat from Lebanon...

...Given America's post-Vietnam aversion to nation-building, and since Washington hasn't even yet opened a U.S...

...They'd love to buy oil-drilling equipment, big electric turbines, and high technology from the United States, not to mention American military equipment, if they could get their hands on it...

...Like clerical Iran, al Qaeda wants Muslims to put aside their sectarian differences for the greater calling against the United States...

...And the prime minister doesn't appear any less delighted today...

...We must be prepared, however, to take the battle more directly to the mullahs if they continue to resupply Hezbollah by other means or to pursue a liaison with al Qaeda...

...less fierce...

...And Iranians are rather good with, as they say in the trade, "cut-outs...

...Ali Khamenei, Iran's clerical godfather, found the president to be "a man thirsty for human blood" and the United States "the greatest evil" in the world—fairly routine commentary from a mullah capable of much more creative anti-American invective...

...Both favored the Conoco oil-and-gas deal cancelled by the Clinton administration in 1995...

...One just had to ignore the occasional expatriate killing spree, the clerical regime's penchant for supporting radical Palestinians, and its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs, which were justified in any case since Saddam Hussein was still right next door...

...The clerical regime has been seriously seeking nuclear weapons since the end of the Gulf War in 1991...

...In particular, the Saudi royal family, for whom Iran's revolutionary clerics have a special distaste, can be battered internally if its nemesis, Osama bin Laden and his organization, survives...

...Their leaders are amoral dictators, with an acute appreciation of power politics and their enemy's jugular...

...Tehran now just has to bide its time, hoping that the Americans—whom the clerics fear far more than the Afghan-meddling Pakistanis—don't have the perseverance to long remain a force in Afghan politics...

...In Washington, some U.S...

...However, if al Qaeda's liaison with Iran is active, then Washington should probably take the gloves off and hit the clerical regime with enormous force...

...Zawahiri, bin Laden's right-hand man, has long been admired in Tehran, where he has visited on occasion...

...And the clerics didn't sabotage the Bonn conference on Afghanistan's political future...

...Now, Iran's possible relationship with al Qaeda is, of course, an enormous wild card...

...With the department's Policy Planning boss Richard Haass in the lead, State began sending signals to Tehran, and to Congress, that Iran was being helpful to America's antiterrorist coalition...

...More important, Western neglect, the failure of Western Europe and the United States to threaten clerical Iran meaningfully, allowed Iran's terrorist apparatus in Lebanon—the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Intelli-gence—to stay in training...

...Somebody came to the rescue with a large delivery of C-4—not easily available on the arms market in such quantity, and probably not something you'd want to haul quickly from landlocked Afghanistan...

...These flights sustain the "Party of God," making them a force to be reckoned with in southern Lebanon and increasingly and clandestinely a key arms-supplier to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank...

...A good-guy-Khatami-versus-bad-guy-Khamenei view took hold at Foggy Bottom, as it did in the American business community and academe...

...Al Qaeda, like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad before it, is for Tehran an answer to a 20-year quest to find effective anti-American allies among Sunni Arab Islamic militants...

...It will not be surprising for us to learn that the members of al Qaeda who originally came with Ayman az-Zawahiri from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad have found friendly sanctuary in the Islamic Republic...

...The 1996 Khobar bombing in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which had Tehran's fingerprints all over it, illustrates a classic Iranian technique...

...The capture of the Palestinian Authority's vessel the Karine A, laden with 50 tons of Iranian weaponry, wasn't surprising...

...As the French foreign minister Hubert Védrine put it, America is again being "simplistic...

...Which is, of course, why the Iranians had no need to complicate the Bonn conference...

...Ditto with the Iranian military aid program to Ismail Khan, the Afghan warlord whom the Taliban in 1995 chased from the western provincial capital of Herat...

...Though this was an absurd and dangerous analysis of Iranian culture and the clerical system—the "be-nice-and-the-moderates-might-win" approach to Middle Eastern power politics—the view was quite widespread in the Clinton administration...

...They, like everybody else in the Middle East, watched America's lame coup attempt launched from Jordan go completely awry...

...Terrorism, like any covert action, is an acquired taste—a mental and physical reflex that must be exercised to stay fit and vibrant...

...This philo-Khatami attitude continued past September 11, which is astonishing since the Iranian president had long since become politically irrelevant in Tehran and the clerical town of Qom...

...They simply don't exist at Langley...

...The Middle Eastern mercantile tradition, like the Italian, sees war and commerce as compatible...

...The mullahs have seen harsh rhetoric from Washington before, and the follow-up has usually been Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...

...So, then, what's the big deal, some "pragmatists" are already saying...

...When the French company Total replaced Conoco in 1995, the French prime minister Lionel Jospin exclaimed, "Je me réjouis...

...President Bush's war in Afghanistan has unquestionably altered this perception...

...They can't really see why September 11 fundamentally changed the status quo...

...The Iranians probably believe that al Qaeda, if effectively operational, will continue to strain the alliance as it draws further financial and spiritual support from its extensive Saudi network and fan club, which may well include members of the royal family...

...It also eliminated the self-defeating distinction between Israelis dying and Americans...

...Arafat's young-jackal protégés—the so-called "new generation" of Palestinian leadership—will also have to go, further complicating the Near East bureau's back-up plans if it can't resuscitate Arafat as a viable negotiating partner...

...This strategy is fool's gold...

...The "axis of evil" speech was the logical follow-through on the president's equally historic declaration that the United States would henceforth treat states that harbor terrorists as terrorists themselves...

...Should its course of action be different...

...And the Khobar affair recedes in our memory, camouflaged by the quick Saudi decision to behead Saudi Shiites convicted of the crime and now blurred by al Qae-da's successes...

...officials and Iran experts have believed for nearly a decade that the Iranian regime has retired from anti-American terrorism...

...Minus an oil embargo, the Iranian economy is much too black and elastic to react helpfully—with riots and demonstrations on cue—to boycotts...

...Or the Iranians could easily have transshipped 500 pounds of plastique via Dubai, where the clerics can move anything and anyone in and out...

...There is, by the way, absolutely no evidence, not even good gossip, to suggest that the clerical elite has ever engaged in a moral debate about the ethics of terrorism against the enemies of God and state...

...In the meantime, however, the "pragmatists" will hope, as Secretary of State Colin Powell does, "that we may be able to talk to Iran, that we may be able to have a reasonable conversation with Iranian leaders...

...All in all, according to Ambassador Haass, the Iranians were playing a "constructive" role in Afghanistan...

...Soccer riots that turn into anticlerical demonstrations have resumed...

...In following through on his promise to counter and preempt hostile Iranian actions, the president will likely accelerate the collapse of the clerical regime...

...Which is one reason why State absurdly tried to get Syria to join the antiterrorist coalition...

...Indeed, we may well be watching the clerics immerse themselves again in a wave of anti-American terrorism...

...Also, the clerical regime has been brutalizing the Iranian people for two decades, and the oppression today is, in important ways, much lighter than it was 10 years ago...

...But we should be very wary of believing that the Iranians are now convinced that the Americans will permanently stand and fight...

...Thermidor had arrived...

...An oil embargo would be immensely convulsive (not necessarily a bad thing...

...officials were favorably impressed with Iran's promise to undertake search-and-rescue missions for any American pilot downed over Iranian territory...

...But what exactly does the State of the Union address mean for Iran policy...

...But the good thing about the clerical regime is that it clearly understands power politics...

...With no meaningful leader on the horizon and the cult of Khatami fading fast, many Iranians are looking outside the country for a force that the clerics cannot imprison or kill...

...Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda will continue their propaganda war against the United States and Saudi Arabia...

...They had a ringside seat for America's hapless flailings against Saddam Hussein throughout the 1990s...

...By the president's logic, if not Secretary Powell's, the Karine A should be the last nail in Arafat's coffin...

...military power...

...If President Bush follows his own logic and compels his administration to follow him against Iraq and Iran, then he will sow the seeds for a new, safer, more liberal order in the Middle East...

...The "pro-American drift" (Washington Post) of the Iranian government during the Afghan war was an illusion—Persian realpolitik, as fear of American airpower dovetailed with Western hopefulness and gullibility...

...Winston Churchill once remarked that for a certain number of British officers to be killed in combat each year on the Raj's Northwest Frontier would keep the ruling class vigilant and serious...

...It is a decent bet that many, if not most, diplomats in the bureau would agree wholeheartedly with Ayatollah Kar-rubi's sentiment about Bush's speech...

...The mullahs have been trading with the Western Europeans for 20 years while killing dozens of Iranian expatriates on European soil...

...Khatami's election and his "dialogue-of-civilizations" interview on CNN in January 1998 whetted hopes at State that the cold war between Washington and Tehran, and the tension between us and our allies, might be over...

...The French say more or less the same thing each week in Le Monde Diplomatique...

...The president understands a basic truth about tyrannies that employ terrorism and seek weapons of mass destruction: They are systemically evil...

...This is a good thing, for unless the regime falls, the Islamic Republic's penchant for tyranny, terrorism, and unconventional weaponry will not evanesce...

...Al Qaeda, unlike many fundamentalist Sunni groups, has no nasty anti-Shiite overtones...

...The repercussions of September 11 simply aren't enough in Europe and Russia for effective multilateralism to be an option against the Islamic Republic...

...They watched the Israelis—whom the Iranians see as inextricably linked to America by culture and conspiracy (the unseen, global Jewish cabal that has America in its hands)—unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon in May 2000, abandoning their Lebanese allies to the tender mercies of Hezbollah...

...Nostalgia for the last shah's son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in Virginia, has again risen (this has happened periodically since the revolution...

...Since September 11, Iran has seen an enormous increase in the public display of anticlerical and pro-American emotions...

...If the administration is confident that al Qaeda members are in Iran, then our course of action ought to be clear...

...Nonetheless, it is likely that the State Department, the Europeans, influential voices in the American business and foreign-policy communities, and the American academic crowd specialized in the Middle East will resist the logic of President Bush's "axis of evil" address...

...Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and to a certain extent the Palestine Liberation Organization have all been successful Sunni Arab allies of Shiite Iran's ecumenical, anti-Western foreign policy...

...If the Americans start to act like Europeans—engage in trade and a "critical dialogue" regardless of clerical behavior—why should the mullahs moderate their comportment...

...These flights are easily monitored by surveillance aircraft and spy satellites...

...Although the clerical regime is unquestionably concerned about President Bush's tough language— the Iranians always pay close attention to American commentary, especially when U.S...

...You wouldn't likely grasp, of course, the momentous possibilities in the president's "axis of evil" speech by reading the Iranian reaction to it...

...Laissez-faire trade blended with political rationalism inevitably drops you to the lowest common denominator, which is where the clerics, firstrate realpoliticians with a sharp ideological edge, operate against Westerners most effectively...

...The clerical regime in Iran has invested an enormous amount of its prestige—even its raison d'être—in both Hezbollah and the Palestinians...

...Covert action is a mental muscle that must be in constant training...

...After America's war against Iraq, they were scared of U.S...

...offering to aid a hypothetically downed pilot was not...

...All we would be doing in reality is reaching out to the head of the powerful Expediency Council, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is indeed a moderate, pragmatic, and powerful cleric...

...they both appear to favor Boeing over Airbus if given the choice...

...And Tehran's providing information about the whereabouts of senior Taliban and al Qaeda officials isn't particularly compelling evidence of friendly intentions...

...He was, as an Iranian who'd known him from childhood once remarked, "a chicken," which was one of the most important reasons why Rafsanjani, the first "moderate" president of the republic and the second most powerful mullah in Iran, decided to back him in 1997...

...Al Qaeda does...

...Starting at the periphery of the Iranian world— Lebanon and possibly Afghanistan—probably makes the most tactical and strategic sense...

...If America can hold its ground, two Muslim peoples who were badly burned by the twentieth century just might lead the way for their religious brethren to a more civil society, where the basic human decency their countries knew a century ago could return...

...they will not work against Khamenei...

...It is also stupefying that anyone, 24 years after the revolution, still believes that trade could have a moderating effect on the clerical regime's behavior...

...The PLO, which gave significant aid to the clerics and their Revolutionary Guard Corps at the dawn of the Islamic revolution, has never lost its contacts with the clerical regime—the Karine A being only the latest proof of the clerics' fidelity to undiluted Palestinian radicalism...

...Nevertheless, the State Department saw the Afghan war as an excellent opportunity to build a bridge to the clerical regime, since the enemy (the Iranians) of my enemy (the Taliban) ought to be my friend...

...It is a good litmus test of administration seriousness: The more we hear Washington talking about covert action against the clerics and Saddam Hussein, the more we can be sure that the "war on terrorism" is becoming a listless, phony campaign...

...He remains intimately connected to Hezbollah, an adviser on Lebanon to Iranian clerics of all political stripes...

...Also, when al Qaeda bombs us, the Iranians—unless they're very clumsy—won't get blamed...

...This perception extends to their efforts to obtain nuclear weapons and, no doubt, to their grand objective to use them as leverage to enhance their security and sphere of influence throughout the Middle East...

...The clerics would likely cease any major effort to resupply Hezbollah once it was clear that Washington was serious...

...Tehran has been giving money and weaponry to Palestinian radicals and the Lebanese Hezbollah for years...

...Sanctions simply don't have the painful immediacy needed to dissuade the clerical regime from engaging in nefarious actions it deems in its essential interests...

...Washington's ultimate objective must be to create circumstances inside the Islamic Republic that leave Iranians themselves sensing that the clerical regime no longer has a future...

...Washington should also inform the Assad regime in Damascus—a key partner in the Iran-Hezbollah terrorist network—that these flights must cease and that any ground and naval resupply effort detected through Syrian territory or waters will lead to the swift destruction of the Syrian air force...

...When it happens, God willing, the State Department will finally be able to send signals to Tehran and have a moderate cleric warmly answer...

...in the late 1980s Iranian women were smuggling photos of "baby shah" into Iran taped to their bosoms...

...soldiers and B-52s have been pummeling one of their neighbors—we shouldn't imagine that words alone will register profoundly with Tehran...

...the Iranian reflex is to back down when the opposing force demonstrates that it is willing and able to fight...

...Indeed the Iranians' success at blowing up 241 Marines in Beirut in 1983, and President Reagan's ignominiously rapid retreat, gave birth to modern radical Islamic terrorism against the United States...

...Given the situation inside Iran, President Bush's "axis of evil" address was exceptionally timely, perhaps the equal of Churchill's Fulton speech...

...Al Qaeda would supply the attribute most prized by the clerical regime: plausible deniability, which has usually worked with Westerners, who have never had (the Israelis are the possible exception) the heart and stamina for an unlimited, not particularly fastidious war against terrorism...

...Terrorism at home and abroad comes naturally to profoundly conspiratorial mullahs elevated in great part through the use of clandestine operations and violence...

...And it's natural for foreign service officers to be sympathetic to the views of their hosts, particularly if Washington doesn't fight hard for its own side...

...If al Qaeda can survive the Afghan war, then Tehran stands to gain significantly...

...Many U.S...

...The Bush administration ought to want to unnerve the ruling clerics, and embolden Iran's people, by letting all know that America, as President Bush declared in his State of the Union address, favors real popular government in Iran...

...A return to non-belligerent dialogue, even if indirect and haphazard, will appear to many as a more reasonable approach...

...That would be the proper and just end to America's war on terrorism...

...Mehdi Karrubi, a radical but utterly corrupt cleric who now fashions himself a reformer and a bridge to American VIPs, just called the president "impolite...

...What if Washington doesn't have complete confidence in the information connecting al Qaeda to Iran...

...And the Afghan war has shaken the already abysmal internal confidence of the clergy...

...The Americans and Europeans have for decades committed a cardinal strategic sin in de facto trying to separate Israel from the West, denying it the fraternity, association, and security guarantees that are natural, for example, among NATO members...

...officials...

...A senior American official cannot wake up one day and call out the covert-action brigades...

...warplanes and helicopter crews overflight and search-and-rescue rights in Iranian airspace would have been something...

...sanctions against Iran have certainly had an effect upon the country's economy and its ability to obtain easily certain military technologies...

...The first attempt, against the USS The Sullivans in January 2000, failed when the al Qaeda team overloaded the bomb-carrying skiff with conventional charges and it sank, according to official Yemeni sources...

...consulate in Herat, it's probably a good bet...

...Since the return of Zahir Shah is a troublesome issue for the Afghans themselves, the Iranians need not have worried...

...Lebanon, in particular, offers the United States the option of hitting three targets—Hezbollah, the clerics, and the Assad regime—at once...

...pilot—B-52s and smart bombs concentrate the mind—but it might not have been the quickest homeward voyage...

...What would be an acceptable risk for the Iranians in an al Qaeda terrorist operation...

...This elevated to the level of statecraft the ancient common-law understanding that he who abets murder is a murderer...

...You negotiate with them at your peril...

...And the Bush administration is puffing if it thinks the Europeans and Russians will aid us by tying a tighter economic knot around the clerical regime...

...We should also put out feelers—and let the clerics know that we are doing so—to Iranians, especially officials and military officers, who are interested in a change of government in Tehran...

...The clerics were, so the reasoning went, tired of the battle against the "Great Satan...

...The same can be said of Iran's role among the Lebanese Shiites of Hezbollah and the Palestinian radicals...

...They paid close attention to our halfhearted support and quick abandonment of the Iraqi opposition in northern Iraq in 1995 and 1996...

...And if Rafsan-jani reaches back, he will most certainly beat us black and blue...

...The Iranian people with increasing frequency and volume remind their overlords why the United States— the whispering, seductive devil that infuriated Khomeini—is by its nature an implacable enemy of the Islamic Republic...

...And it is certainly a distressing datum that many key players from Iran's Lebanese terrorist network in the 1980s have found a happy home in the clerical inner circles around Mohammad Khatami...

...For Tehran, al Qaeda is the best of all possible worlds since its kamikaze terrorists are always Sunni and usually die, thereby enhancing operational security...

...The odds are good that much, if not most, of al Qaeda's leadership has escaped...

...Local or rented non-Iranian Shiites are the frontline terrorists— Iran's role is in planning and, if necessary, providing logistical and financial aid...

...The clerical regime has repeatedly made mincemeat of the Central Intelligence Agency's best efforts...

...Its ballistic missile program is even older...

...It may provoke a redrawing of the intellectual map of the Middle East, giving liberal democracy its best chance in the region since the end of World War II...

...The Iranians probably would have returned any stranded U.S...

...Somebody could have delivered the shipment by sea, as the Iranians did when they delivered C-4 and other arms to the Palestinian Authority's freighter Karine A in the Persian Gulf...

...Iran's clerics, particularly the hard core, who dominate the country's government, were acutely aware of the Clinton administration's tendency to scoot in difficult times...

...The same relentless logic leads to confrontations with rogue states...

...As the sad experience of the "moderate" president Mohammad Khatami gives ample evidence, the clerical regime isn't evolving into a humane, "Islamic democracy...

...Without a Soviet sugar daddy behind it, the Assad regime in Syria has become careful about husbanding its expensive, hard-to-replace military hardware...

...Nor is covert action a choice...

...After all, Iran really hasn't changed its spots since September 11...

...they're just cautious...

...They inevitably corrupt and destroy their own civil societies...

...Though one can morally applaud the idea of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich—give $20 million to the clandestine service to use against the clerics—operationally it is a pipe dream...

...It's the pits to be an American diplomat delivering démarches that no one reads, let alone fears...

...The clerics in Tehran, attentive students of history who keenly understand the anti-American ideological underpinnings of their regime, knew that the American enemy of a Muslim foe must remain the enemy...

...The utility, and certainly the pleasure, of anti-American terrorism probably still has serious appeal in Tehran...

...The mullahs now preferred trade to terrorism...

...We have tried everything else before...

...They all embraced Khatami more eagerly than they had Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsan-jani, the cleric who first dampened the revolutionary fires inside his country...

...The clerics in Tehran have for years largely defined their westward-looking foreign policy in terms of what they and Hezbollah could do to strike Israel...

...But none of these groups operates explicitly and consistently against the United States...

...The Iranians aren't cowards...

...The perception of the United States as weak and on the run— the jet-fuel behind Osama bin Laden's holy-warrior call to arms—is not unique to Sunni Arab Muslims...

...diplomacy of its accustomed wiggle-room around Middle Eastern terrorism...

...The al Qaeda link, unfortunately for the "pragma-tists," makes a lot of sense...

...The facts on the ground, not any arrangements in Germany, will decide Afghanistan's fate...

...Rafsanjani and Khamenei, who have probably authorized every Iranian terrorist operation since the early 1980s, have both advocated increasing U.S.Iranian commerce...

...The mullahs have likely perceived that the ally (Osama bin Laden) of my enemy (the Taliban) can be my friend...

...Washington doesn't have, as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice suggested, "a multiplicity of means" to deal with the clerical regime...

...They are not, as some Lebanon-saturated journalists still like to say, just "a national liberation movement" (the Shiite Amal, not Hezbollah, properly deserve that title...

...The Europeans, who were all over Iran trying to find a way to make a profit, kept telling Americans how the country had changed...

...officials spoke with hushed awe of the intelligence Tehran provided about the whereabouts of Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden...

...The clerics repeatedly saw the Clinton and Bush administrations call upon the Israelis to exercise "restraint...

...The more bin Laden and al Qaeda can roil the intellectual environment of the Middle East, the more America's Muslim allies in the region can be kept off balance...

...The clerics, who understandably felt uncomfortable with the image of a shah returning to unify his nation, found all the discussion of the king's return frightfully loathsome...

...And Iran's ruling clergy has probably been reading the Middle East more or less the same way as the Sunni fundamentalists who made bin Laden and al Qaeda paladins in their battle against the West...

...Allowing U.S...

...The Iranian intelligence service might regularly murder expatriates in Europe and the Middle East, and Tehran might send lethal aid to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad for their attacks against Israelis and Jews, these experts think, but the clerics no longer really want to attack the United States...

...And the Iranians definitely feared Ronald Reagan, yet were willing to bomb us on his watch...

...they have had no visible effect upon the clerical regime's behavior...

...We should immediately threaten the clerics' regime militarily where it would hurt them and help us most: the Tehran-to-Damascus military transport planes that supply Hezbollah in Lebanon...

...The Iranians know that the Israelis know that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is an appendage of the clerical regime, which has made the Israelis' "measured" reactions even more damning...

...Tehran's arming of Ismail Khan, as we can now clearly see, is a double-edged affair, since with the strategic city of Herat back in the Iranian orbit, the clerics can once again become players in Afghanistan's hardball internecine politics...

...they would of course test to see whether we were serious...

...military actions far less so...

...Sanctions haven't worked against Saddam Hussein...

...In fact, we have only two meaningful options: Confront clerical Iran and its proxies militarily or ring it with an oil embargo...

...By the 1990s, Iranian intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and their faithful followers in the Lebanese Hezbollah, particularly its voraciously lethal security chief Imad Mughniyah, had stopped blowing up embassies and Marine barracks and kidnapping and killing American citizens and U.S...

...The members of Hezbollah are truly the only faithful offspring of Iran's Islamic revolution...

...With Khatami in the presidency, there would be no radical change...

...The mullahs would outgrow their bad habits, we were told, as the regime aged and democratized...

...Even before May 1997, when Mohammad Khatami was first elected president, there was little enthusiasm within the bureau for the Clinton administration's strategy of "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran...

...Whatever they gave us obviously wasn't top-drawer stuff since most of the leadership of the Taliban and al Qaeda appear to have escaped...

...The "loss" of Hezbollah would be an enormous and embarrassing blow to the mullahs, shaking the regime to its foundations...

...Perhaps the most watched barometer of American nerve in the Middle East—Will Washington allow Israel to fight?— has indicated for years that America no longer has the loins to maintain its influence in the region...

...Behind all the discontent released since September 11 is the hope that somehow America can make it right...

...The Iranian people certainly deserve the same type of support we gave the Poles in the 1980s, but the odds are very high that any large-scale, covert-action effort by Lan-gley, still a profoundly dysfunctional institution, would put brave Iranians into harm's way for no meaningful result...

...It is still too early to know how many members of al Qaeda have left Afghanistan...

...Yasser Arafat and Syria will have to go to the doghouse...

...All the Iranians really needed from the conference was the assurance that the exiled Afghan king, Zahir Shah, wasn't immediately going home...

...Just a quick read of bin Laden's declarations and interviews reveals that the similarities between his views and those of the ruling clerics in Tehran are far greater than their differences...

...The clerics, especially the ruling hard core, don't precisely separate domestic and external foes...

...Al Qaeda's bombing runs also provide Tehran with camouflaging static noise, allowing the clerics more maneuvering room to plan their own unilateral terrorist operations if they so choose...

...The Iranian calculation on anti-American terrorism has always been fairly straightforward: Is there a buffer between Tehran and the frontline terrorists sufficient to conceal adequately its involvement...

...By being ever more vocal in his calls for secular democracy in his homeland, Pahlavi has reinforced his appeal among Iranians, who, even if they are old enough to remember his father, no longer always spit when they hear the word "shah...

...And if the Near East bureau of the Department of State has much to do with the execution of the new policy, we can rest assured it will be a lot less fierce this time...

...He had repeatedly failed to throw down the gauntlet at those in the regime who were increasingly harassing journalists, students, government employees, and women—all important voices in the "civil society" coalition that twice elected Khatami...

...Washington must be ready to target Revolutionary Guard Corps units in Lebanon and inside Iran, along with Ministry of Intelligence facilities and personnel...

...Given the op-eds and think-tank papers written just before and during the Afghan war—essays that carried the signatures of former national security adviser Brent Scow-croft, former secretary of defense James Schlesinger, former congressman Lee Hamilton, and former undersecretary of state for political affairs Thomas Pickering—this detentist view of commerce and politics still has currency in establishment circles...

...The 1996 bombing at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 American soldiers threw a kink into this analysis, but the election of Mohammad Khatami arrived just in time to quiet serious reflection on that bloody episode the summer before...

...This perspective, again, is astonishing since Mohammad Khatami—regardless of whatever he believes in his eclectic mullah soul—was a political irrelevancy in Iran even before his reelection in June 2001...

...It seemed shocking only because of the quantity of arms captured in one raid, not because of the provenance of the weapons...

...Export-oriented Europe didn't like it, and the administration didn't really want to enforce sanctions against our allies and the Russians, who are the principal arms-supplier to Tehran...

...Tehran should be notified that no future flights will be permitted—that any aircraft seen or suspected of carrying military materiel will be forcibly diverted to Israel, shot down, or destroyed on the tarmac...

...And the truth be told: Khatami and Khamenei do not in all probability significantly differ on whether the United States, by its very nature, is harmful to the Islamic Republic...

...The administration must not, under any circumstances, reach out to "moderate" and "pragmatic" mullahs to the detriment of the Iranian people...

...Mohammad Khatami may be a limp reformer, but the reform movement, fueled by the frustration and anger of the Iranian people, stays alive, always inflaming the democratic spirit that is woven into the contradictory political ethos of the Islamic Republic's theocracy...

...Many diplomats in the Near East bureau at State found the new policy distasteful, correctly discerning that it deprives U.S...

...The Europeans can, perhaps, be forgiven for being a bit dismayed that George W. Bush has so abruptly changed the ground rules that they and many Americans had long accepted...

...Without aircraft and tanks to intimidate its own citizenry, the Assad family might well fall...

...I am delighted...

...If the information that the U.S...

...Universities have again become arenas for rallies and open dissension...

...By allowing Israel to bleed through terrorist attack—by failing to state clearly and unequivocally that the West does not recognize terrorism against Israelis as legitimate, and by not bringing Western arms to bear against Hezbollah and the PLO when they engaged in outrageous acts of terrorism—the West encouraged the Iranian clergy, among others, to view terrorism as a legitimate and successful means of statecraft...

...And they watched Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's government absorb, without serious reprisal, hit after hit from Palestinian terrorists, some of whom, like the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, verge on being wholly owned subsidiaries of Tehran...

...As a professor at Tehran university put it, "If the Americans could destroy the Taliban, inshallah, they might do the same to our religious despots...

...If we turn a blind eye toward Iranian support of al Qaeda, we are asking for it...

...The clerical ruling class had coalesced decisively around Khamenei...

...Soccer riots and university demonstrations are particularly unnerving since they threaten the integrity of the regime's security forces, which are composed largely of young men not so dissimilar in cultural background and upbringing from the young men yelling the anticlerical chants and lighting candles to show sympathy for America's loss...

...President Khatami, who usually smiles more forcefully than he speaks, called the State of the Union "belligerent, insulting, and anti-Iranian...

...The Iranians have repeatedly gotten away with murder—in the Middle East, in Europe, and elsewhere—and learned well how "sophisticated" Westerners can waffle in response to terrorism...

...government has on Iranian assistance to al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan is ironclad, the "pragmatic" approach to Tehran will collapse, at least on this side of the Atlantic...

...Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur, Iran's former ambassador to Syria and Imad Mughniyah's boss, for instance, has settled in comfortably as a clerical reformer...

...This was nonsense...

...Bin Laden sometimes dates "Islam's worldwide jihad" against America from the Beirut action...

...Perhaps supplying the organization with approximately 500 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives for its attack against the USS Cole in the port of Aden in October 2000...

...Fundamentally, no...

...If Washington wants to dissuade and punish the clerical regime, it will have to use force, the only currency the clerics truly respect...

...September 11 has obviously and significantly damaged U.S.-Sau-di ties...