In following through on his promise to counter and pre-empt hostile Iranian actions, the president will likely accelerate the collapse of the clerical regime. This is a good thing, for unless the regime falls, the Islamic Republic's penchant for tyranny, terrorism, and unconventional weaponry will not evanesce.

As the sad experience of the "moderate" president Mohammad Khatami gives ample evidence, the clerical regime isn't evolving into a humane, "Islamic democracy". Indeed, we may well be watching the clerics immerse themselves again in a wave of anti-American terrorism.

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. Ali Khameneh’i, 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… (The French say more or less the same thing each week in "Le Monde Diplomatique").

President Khatami, who usually smiles more forcefully than he speaks, called the State of the Union "belligerent, insulting, and anti-Iranian". Mehdi Karroobi**, a radical but utterly corrupt cleric who now fashions himself a reformer and a bridge to American VIPs, just called the president "impolite"….The mullahs have seen harsh rhetoric from Washington before, and the follow-up has usually been less fierce.

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…

Khatami's election and his "dialogue-of-civilisations" 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. A good-guy-Khatami-versus-bad-guy-Khameneh’i view took hold at Foggy Bottom, as it did in the American business community and academe. They all embraced Khatami more eagerly than they had Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the cleric who first dampened the revolutionary fires inside his country.

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. 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….

In Washington, some U.S. officials spoke with hushed awe of the intelligence Tehran provided about the whereabouts of Taleban leaders and Osama Ben Laden. And the clerics didn't sabotage the Bonn conference on Afghanistan's political future. All in all, according to Ambassador Haass, the Iranians were playing a "constructive" role in Afghanistan.

This was nonsense. 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. 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.

In the war against the Taleban, the clerics actually gave us little to nothing… Tehran's providing information about the whereabouts of senior Taleban and al Qa’eda officials isn't particularly compelling evidence of friendly intentions. Whatever they gave us obviously wasn't top-drawer stuff since most of the leadership of the Taleban and al Qa’eda appear to have escaped.

Also, if the clerics could get Americans to bomb Taleban leaders they hate,.. 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. Which is, of course, why the Iranians had no need to complicate the Bonn conference. The facts on the ground, not any arrangements in Germany, will decide Afghanistan's fate. All the Iranians really needed from the conference was the assurance that the exiled Afghan king, Zaher Shah, wasn't immediately going home.

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. Since the return of Zaher Shah is a troublesome issue for the Afghans themselves, the Iranians need not have worried. 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. Given America's post-Vietnam aversion to nation-building, and since Washington hasn't even yet opened a U.S. consulate in Herat, it's probably a good bet.

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

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. officials…

Thermidor had arrived. The mullahs now preferred trade to terrorism. After America's war against Iraq, they were scared of U.S. military power. The Europeans.. kept telling Americans how the country had changed. 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 mullahs would outgrow their bad habits, we were told, as the regime aged and democratised.

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 Khatami arrived just in time to quiet serious reflection on that bloody episode the summer before. 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. 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...

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 re-election in June 2001. The clerical ruling class had coalesced decisively around Khameneh’i. And the truth be told: Khatami and Khameneh’i do not in all probability significantly differ on whether the United States, by its very nature, is harmful to the Islamic Republic.

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 behaviour. The Middle Eastern mercantile tradition, like the Italian, sees war and commerce as compatible. Rafsanjani and Khameneh’i, who have probably authorised every Iranian terrorist operation since the early 1980s, have both advocated increasing U.S.-Iranian commerce. Both favoured the Conoco oil-and-gas deal cancelled by the Clinton administration in 1995;... 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...

If the Americans start to act like Europeans--engage in trade and a "critical dialogue" regardless of clerical behaviour--why should the mullahs moderate their comportment? Laissez-faire trade blended with political rationalism inevitably drops you to the lowest common denominator, which is where the clerics, first-rate realpoliticians with a sharp ideological edge, operate against Westerners most effectively.

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 specialised in the Middle East will resist the logic of President Bush's "axis of evil" address…

AFTER ALL, Iran really hasn't changed its spots since September 11. The clerical regime has been seriously seeking nuclear weapons since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. Its ballistic missile program is even older. Tehran has been giving money and weaponry to Palestinian radicals and the Lebanese Hezbollah for years. The capture of the Palestinian Authority's vessel the "Karine A", laden with 50 tons of Iranian weaponry, wasn't surprising... And the Khobar affair recedes in our memory, camouflaged by the quick Saudi decision to behead Saudi Shi’ites convicted of the crime and now blurred by al Qa’eda's successes.

So, then, what's the big deal, some "pragmatists" are already saying. 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. They can't really see why September 11 fundamentally changed the status quo. As the French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine put it, America is again being "simplistic."

Now, Iran's possible relationship with al Qa’eda is, of course, an enormous wild card. If the information that the U.S. government has on Iranian assistance to al Qa’eda members fleeing Afghanistan is ironclad, the "pragmatic" approach to Tehran will collapse, at least on this side of the Atlantic…

The al Qa’eda link, unfortunately for the "pragmatists," makes a lot of sense. The mullahs have likely perceived that the ally (Osama Ben Laden) of my enemy (the Taleban) can be my friend… It will not be surprising for us to learn that the members of al Qa’eda who originally came with Ayman az-Zawahiri from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad have found friendly sanctuary in the Islamic Republic.

Zawahiri, Ben Laden's right-hand man, has long been admired in Tehran, where he has visited on occasion. Al Qa’eda, 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. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and to a certain extent the Palestine Liberation Organisation -- which gave significant aid to the clerics and their Revolutionary Guard Corps at the dawn of the Islamic revolution -- have all been successful Sunni Arab allies of Shi’ite Iran's ecumenical, anti-Western foreign policy...

If al Qa’eda can survive the Afghan war, then Tehran stands to gain significantly. Osama Ben Laden and al Qa’eda will continue their propaganda war against the United States and Saudi Arabia. Just a quick read of Ben 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.

Also, when al Qa’eda bombs us, the Iranians--unless they're very clumsy--won't get blamed. 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?..

The Iranians aren't cowards; they're just cautious. 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. And the Iranians definitely feared Ronald Reagan, yet were willing to bomb us on his watch. 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.

Ben Laden sometimes dates "Islam's worldwide jihad" against America from the Beirut action. 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. Ali Akbar Mohtashemipoor, Iran's former ambassador to Syria and Imad Mughniyah's boss, for instance, has settled in comfortably as a clerical reformer. He remains intimately connected to Hezbollah, an adviser on Lebanon to Iranian clerics of all political stripes.

And Iranians are rather good with, as they say in the trade, "cut-outs…. Local or rented non-Iranian Shi’ites are the frontline terrorists--Iran's role is in planning and, if necessary, providing logistical and financial aid.

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

What would be an acceptable risk for the Iranians in an al Qa’eda terrorist operation? Perhaps supplying the organisation with approximately 500 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives for its attack against the USS Cole in the port of Aden in October 2000…

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

They paid close attention to our half-hearted support and quick abandonment of the Iraqi opposition in northern Iraq in 1995 and 1996. They, like everybody else in the Middle East, watched America's lame coup attempt launched from Jordan go completely awry. They watched the Israelis--whom the Iranians see as inextricably linked to America by culture and conspiracy --…unilaterally withdraw from Lebanon in May 2000, abandoning their Lebanese allies to the tender mercies of Hezbollah. Ali Khameneh’i and Mohammad Khatami both made breathtaking, inspiring speeches about the Israeli retreat from 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. The clerics repeatedly saw the Clinton and Bush administrations call upon the Israelis to exercise "restraint". 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...

By allowing Israel to bleed through terrorist attack--by failing to state clearly and unequivocally that the West does not recognise 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.

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 Intelligence--to stay in training.

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. The same can be said of Iran's role among the Lebanese Shiites of Hezbollah and the Palestinian radicals. The clerical regime in Iran has invested an enormous amount of its prestige--even its raison d'etre--in both Hezbollah and the Palestinians. The members of Hezbollah are truly the only faithful offspring of Iran's Islamic revolution. 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 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. 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.

President Bush's war in Afghanistan has unquestionably altered this perception. But we should be very wary of believing that the Iranians are now convinced that the Americans will permanently stand and fight. The utility, and certainly the pleasure, of anti-American terrorism probably still have serious appeal in Tehran. And the Afghan war has shaken the already abysmal internal confidence of the clergy.

The clerics, especially the ruling hard core, don't precisely separate domestic and external foes. Terrorism at home and abroad comes naturally to profoundly conspiratorial mullahs elevated in great part through the use of clandestine operations and violence. And the clerics have reason to be scared of their own flock. 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.

Since September 11, Iran has seen an enormous increase in the public display of anticlerical and pro-American emotions. Soccer riots that turn into anticlerical demonstrations have resumed; 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.

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

Behind all the discontent released since September 11 is the hope that somehow America can make it right. 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. As a professor at Tehran University put it, "If the Americans could destroy the Taleban, inshallah, they might do the same to our religious despots".

GIVEN the situation inside Iran, President Bush's "axis of evil" address was exceptionally timely, perhaps the equal of Churchill's Fulton speech. But what exactly does the State of the Union address mean for Iran policy?

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

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

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 Qa’eda. Washington must be ready to target Revolutionary Guard Corps units in Lebanon and inside Iran, along with Ministry of Intelligence facilities and personnel. 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 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, favours real popular government in Iran. The administration must not, under any circumstances, reach out to "moderate" and "pragmatic" mullahs to the detriment of the Iranian people.

This strategy is fool's gold. 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. And if Rafsanjani reaches back, he will most certainly beat us black and blue.

What if Washington doesn't have complete confidence in the information connecting al-Qa’eda to Iran? Should its course of action be different? Fundamentally, no. Washington doesn't have, as national security adviser Condoleezza Rice suggested, "a multiplicity of means" to deal with the clerical regime.

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.... Sanctions haven't worked against Saddam Hussein; they will not work against Khameneh’i.

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. When the French company Total replaced Conoco in 1995, the French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin exclaimed, "Je me rejouis!" ("I am delighted!")… The repercussions of September 11 simply aren't enough in Europe and Russia for effective multilateralism to be an option against the Islamic Republic.

Nor is covert action a choice. The clerical regime has repeatedly made mincemeat of the Central Intelligence Agency's best efforts. Covert action is a mental muscle that must be in constant training. A senior American official cannot wake up one day and call out the covert-action brigades. They simply don't exist at Langley...

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 Langley, still a profoundly dysfunctional institution, would put brave Iranians into harm's way for no meaningful result. 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.

If Washington wants to dissuade and punish the clerical regime, it will have to use force, the only currency the clerics truly respect. An oil embargo would be immensely convulsive (not necessarily a bad thing); military actions far less so. Starting at the periphery of the Iranian world--Lebanon and possibly Afghanistan--probably makes the most tactical and strategic sense. Lebanon, in particular, offers the United States the option of hitting three targets--Hezbollah, the clerics, and the Assad regime--at once.

However, if al Qa’eda's liaison with Iran is active, then Washington should probably take the gloves off and hit the clerical regime with enormous force. If we turn a blind eye toward Iranian support of al Qa’eda, we are asking for it.

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

They inevitably corrupt and destroy their own civil societies. You negotiate with them at your peril. 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.

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

Editor’s note: The above article is an edited version of the original one published by the Paris-based "Iran va Jahan (Iran and the World).

*Mrl Marc Gerecht is a former CIA operative and expert on the Middle East.

The Weekly Standard published the original article under the title of Flashback: On to Iran!

** Hojjatoleslam Karroobi is the Speaker of the present Iranian Majles, or parliament

Highlights are from IPS