In response, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets Monday to protest, in the biggest mass demonstrations against the United States in years. If Bush’s intention was to unite Iran’s reformers and its hard-liners, who have been locked in a bitter struggle, he succeeded.

With the war on terrorism enjoying massive popular support, hawks have jumped onto the Bush bandwagon, stepping up their calls for the United States to openly attack regimes they deem dangerous — a list to which Iran has suddenly been added. Conservative pundit William Safire has led the charge. Pointing to Israel’s recent seizure of Iranian arms destined for Arafat’s Palestinian Authority while ominously invoking Iran’s nuclear program, in a New York Times column last month Safire essentially called for a preemptive military strike against Iran. (Safire backpeddled a bit later, calling for “surgical” military strikes only if Iran developed nuclear weapons.) In recent weeks, American officials have accused Iran of harboring al-Qaida escapees and trying to destabilize Afghanistan’s new government. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld charged that Iran runs terrorist training camps in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Bush administration moderate, threw down the gauntlet to Iran.

These bellicose statements from the administration and influential pundits — driven by a desire to justify missile defense and a bloated defense budget and maintain a climate of fear that will guarantee President Bush’s popularity — are certain to resurrect Americans’ worst fears about Iran, painting it as an extremist monolith bent on supporting every terrorist group across the globe that has an anti-Western tilt.

That image is inaccurate. And expanding America’s war on terrorism to include Iran would be a serious, if not catastrophic, mistake. At this crucial moment, with a suspicious Islamic world watching the United States’ next move and our European allies increasingly dismayed at American unilateralism, it is critical that our government doesn’t retreat into outmoded stereotypes and simplistic good-versus-evil distinctions. Vital foreign policy decisions must not be driven by newly empowered hawks who are using the national consensus against terrorism to try to push through narrow, flawed and ultimately dangerous agendas.

It is long past time to ask some honest questions regarding our Iran policy, questions that go well beyond the rudimentary analysis offered by the Bush administration. Do we continue our confrontational stance towards Iran, which has completely failed over the past 20 years, or escalate it even further to open hostilities? Or do we seek to constructively engage with a flawed but dynamic, increasingly democratic and fast-evolving country? The stakes are high. No nation is more crucial to the entire direction of America’s future foreign policy, especially with regard to the Muslim world, as Iran. And every substantial strategic and tactical argument points to adopting a new policy of American engagement.

Contrary to what the Bush administration and its entourage of conservative hawks would like us to believe, contemporary Iran is not a nation of maniacal zealots but a complex blend of tradition and modernity, pluralism and authoritarian rule.

The history of my own family is a perfect illustration of this. For my grandfather, Islam was everything. The first son of a farmer from northern Iran, he enrolled in the religious seminaries in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, immersing himself in a lifelong study of Islamic law and theology. He banned music in his household and considered Christians and Jews unclean.

His youngest brother, however, was transformed in a different way. Hussein Agha had opened up an office for the family textile business in Italy, and by the time he returned to Iran he had traded in his fez and prayer beads for an Italian suit, a phonograph and a stack of American orchestra favorites. A generation later, my grandfather’s eldest son, Ahmad Agha, turned to tradition like his father before him. Even as our family’s large pharmaceuticals corporation grew up around him in the 1970s, he shunned calculators and continued to do the company accounting on a traditional wood-carved abacus. My father and his brother Muhammad, the youngest of their generation, would swing the pendulum back again, against tradition. They both settled in the West, far from the Muslim heartland, with my father taking an American bride of Jewish-Christian descent born in the Bronx.

These are not atypical family anecdotes. Such diversity — religious, cultural, political — is found not only within countless Iranian families but within the country itself. Unfortunately, too few Americans have come to know this Iran, and the prevailing environment of hostility between the two nations has only contributed to this ignorance. Over the last 20 years, the bearded zealot has been the dominant face of Iran in the American imagination. After all, who can forget those searing images of enraged crowds shouting “death to America” and parading blindfolded embassy hostages? But we Americans forget our own history when we say we don’t understand the fanaticism of Iran. We forget the hostile crowds of our own Revolutionary War, burning effigies of King George and denouncing him as the incarnation of Satan. We forget our own revolutionary leaders firing American imaginations by associating revolt with the second coming of Christ and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Iran is not so different from what America once was.

Times have changed in Iran since the Islamic revolution. There are still angry crowds on the streets of Tehran, but their rage has not been directed at America — at least, not until Bush’s speech — but at Iran’s repressive religious regime. They chant “Down with the mullahs!” and “We love America!” They hold spontaneous moments of silence in packed soccer stadiums for those killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most of the people in those crowds have no memory of the revolution, the autocratic Shah or his American patrons. They are the two-thirds of Iran’s nearly 70 million people who are under 25 and have grown up almost entirely under theocratic rule. Unlike the foot soldiers of past American and Iranian revolutions, these people do not color their revolt with religious imagery. They do not threaten to export Islamic revolution. Instead, they crave Western freedoms. They have more in common with the global youth of the MTV generation than they do with the stern clerics who govern them. They are the future faces of Iran.

But aren’t the Iranian people powerless, as in so many Middle Eastern nations? Don’t they cower under the yoke of one-party states such as Egypt or Syria, or brutal military tyrants like those of Iraq and Algeria? No. The Bush administration’s efforts to lump Iran together with dictatorships across the Middle East flies in the face of the fact — acknowledged by all serious students of the region — that it is one of the most democratic nations in the region. Voter turnout for Iran’s free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections regularly dwarfs percentages for their American counterparts. And the last several elections in Iran have been dominated by a young, brash constituency that has returned reformists, led by president Mohammad Khatami, to power through landslide victories. Khatami’s platform: reinvigorating Iranian civil society and enhancing the rule of law while engaging in what he calls a “Dialogue Among Civilizations” with the Western world. Unlike other states in the region that have flirted with democracy by establishing hollow, top-down institutions with no real authority, Iranian democracy has roots that reach deep down to the local level. In February 1999 voters in 730 cities and 40,000 villages elected about 200,000 local council members across the country, including more than 500 women.

Nevertheless, President Khatami and his supporters are indeed locked in a power struggle with an “un-elected few” — the conservative clerics, led by Iran’s spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, who control the armed forces, the judiciary and the intelligence services. A Guardian council screens all candidates for elections and blocks legislation considered “un-Islamic.” Reformist newspapers are shut down for expressing dissent and calling for change. Intellectuals are hunted and murdered for their views; dissidents are subjected to closed and dubious trials. Religious minorities are persecuted. Large religious foundations with ties to the government and billions in petro-dollar resources fund terrorist groups around the world. The conservative mullahs of Iran regularly denounce American and Israeli imperialism and seek weapons of mass destruction.

But time is not on the side of Iran’s conservative mullahs. To understand why, one must look at Iran’s recent history.

They say that revolutions eat their children, and in the beginning, the Islamic revolution in Iran proved this maxim. An unlikely coalition of secular leftists, students, workers, urbanized peasants, traditional merchants and religious classes, all with very different conceptions of what Iran would look like upon victory, united to oppose the Shah. After the Pahlavi regime fell, the mullahs were able to impose their vision of Islamic rule on the fractured political landscape. Fighting a devastating eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s (a war in which the United States provided arms to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq), the ruling clerics threw family planning out the window and encouraged Iranians to breed them an army. Iran’s population nearly doubled in the 20 years following the revolution, and the younger generation that is trying to reshape the political system was born. In the end, the children of Iran may, in fact, eat the revolution — but they will need our help.

The question is how best to help Iran’s new generation of democrats and accelerate the demise of its authoritarians. Unfortunately, America’s prevailing policy over the past 20 years has only hindered Iran’s new generation while indirectly helping the ruling regime maintain power. America has been in a state of enmity with Iran since the aftermath of the ’79 revolution, when it broke ties and imposed economic sanctions on it with the intention of punishing Iran for its extremism, reducing the resources it could devote to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, isolating it from the world and perhaps motivating its people to overthrow the clerical regime.

This initial move was understandable, but America — clinging to a policy of “dual containment” that treated Iran and Iraq as equal international pariahs — has failed to adapt to Iran’s new realities. The heavy-handed Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, which imposed unilateral secondary sanctions against companies that invested in energy development in Iran or Libya, has alienated our trading partners, portrayed us as an arrogant nation imposing its will on the rest of the world and completely failed to dislodge the hard-line mullahs. The world community, including our staunchest allies, has not joined the American embargo against Iran. Our sanctions regime, far from isolating the Islamic Republic, seems to have only isolated us. It is seen as unfairly punishing everyday Iranians for the misdeeds of their government.

Most important, the current American containment policy gives the conservative mullahs of Iran exactly what they want. It keeps Iranian civil society, primed and ready for change, more insulated from global interaction and off-balance. It allows the clerics to blame America, instead of government mismanagement and corruption, for Iran’s economic problems. It promotes a paranoid siege mentality among the mullahs that will make Iran more, not less, reluctant to moderate its nuclear aspirations. Far from forcing productive change upon Iran, American policy has inhibited it. Bush’s recent speech, as reported in Salon and the New York Times — whose Feb. 8 headline noted “Bush’s comments bolster old guard in Tehran” — has only made matters worse.

Even if American sanctions were effective, the Iranian government — which has $20 billion in annual oil revenues — would still have more than enough resources to suppress internal dissent, support anti-Israel terror and fund a nuclear weapons program. The current American policy gives us no leverage over the Iranian regime and does little to hurt it. Which is why the most positive initial step America could take would be to unilaterally drop the economic sanctions against Iran.

Iran is ripe for change. A clear constituency within the Iranian government, backed by a clear majority of the Iranian population, believes in democratic reform and wants to re-engage with America. But Iranians are not waiting to be “liberated” from the mullahs by America, as Safire wants us to believe. The last time America “liberated” Iran was through a CIA-backed coup d’itat in 1953 that replaced the elected government of Muhammad Mossadegh — whose crime was nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now known as British Petroleum — with the autocratic Muhammad Reza Shah. The Shah’s brutally repressive policies, indecisiveness and reliance on his American patrons contributed to a violent backlash 26 years later in the Islamic revolution. Iran’s reformers want to see their nation evolve within their current political system, as they showed by their overwhelming participation in the recent elections. We have little to lose by fostering dialogue with this group.

Defenders of America’s enmity towards Iran argue that if we were to warm up to Iran we would lend legitimacy to an authoritarian group of clerics and give them an excuse to crack down further on the burgeoning reform movement. Reactionaries in Iran might claim that reformists have become American stooges, like the Shah of the old Iran. But this slander has been used so many times in the political squabbles of the last 20 years in Iran that it has become a hollow charge. Moreover, there is no real rage anymore among the Iranian people toward America to back it up. Anti-American demonstrations have become affairs staged by conservative groups and their lackeys. They do not enjoy support from the broader population.

And escalating American-Iranian hostility by a unilateral military reprisal against Iran, as Bush’s saber-rattling speech hints we might do, would be catastrophic for positive change in Iran — not to mention its devastating effects on America’s standing in the entire region. Already our European allies have distanced themselves from President Bush’s tough talk, correctly suspecting that he is using the terror war to advance unrelated foreign policy goals against old American foes. Moreover, military action against Iran wouldn’t work. An attack on Iran will only cause its people to close ranks around the conservative mullahs, refocusing their energy outwards towards a foreign foe instead of inwards at a restrictive regime. Iran’s new generation has little reason to hate America. It would be imprudent to give them one.

We have a precedent for this exact scenario in the not too distant past. In 1986 the Reagan administration bombed Libya, claiming that it had unequivocally silenced one of the demons of global state-sponsored terrorism, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi. We know now that American aggression only rallied the country to Gadhafi’s side, allowing him to crack down on the Libyan resistance movement, which had been growing in strength. Moreover, the Reagan bombing didn’t prevent Libyan agents from downing Pan Am Flight 103 two years later. After Sept. 11, Americans know firsthand what effect a foreign attack on a country’s soil can have on patriotic feeling among its citizens and the approval rating of leaders (including those whose legitimacy had been called into question). Iran’s mullahs have become increasingly unpopular. Let’s not reverse this trend.

The weapon America has that the ruling mullahs of Iran fear most is one we have not used yet. It is not a bomb or a missile. It is the unmatched power of cultural and economic exchange that has made and remade societies for millennia. Greater contact with the outside world will obliterate the climate of paranoia and fear in Iran and empower its people, especially its bold young people, to challenge the ruling classes in even more provocative ways.

An Iran that is more integrated with the world community of nations would also be a more law-abiding, moderate country. The business of terrorism and nuclear proliferation becomes more costly for a government when it stands to lose substantial trade and investment by maintaining these policies. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs need to be created each year in Iran. By providing some of those jobs through increased economic ties, we create a constituency within Iran for moderation and lawful behavior. By continuing to blockade Iran, we deprive ourselves of this crucial leverage over Iran’s actions.

But what about Iran’s support for anti-Israel terrorist groups — the single issue most decisive in leading the Bush administration, which was lobbied hard by Israel, to place Iran in the “axis of evil” column? Iran has a hard-line anti-Israel stance and supports Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese-based Shi’ite group. To a lesser extent, it provides support to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and, to a much lesser extent, Hamas. The latter two groups have staged numerous terrorist attacks against Israel. As a result, the U.S. State Department lists Iran as “the most active state sponsor of terrorism.”

Ending Iran’s support for these groups in the endless semi-war between Israel and the Palestinians is a key goal of America’s Iran policy. But allowing that entire policy to be determined by that is unwise, as numerous analysts have pointed out.

In any case, befriending the Iranian regime, not justifying Iran’s support for terrorism by remaining hostile, is a more effective strategy. (Even the head of Israel’s intelligence service, Mossad, believes that pursuing better relations with Iran will ensure Israel’s security better than confrontation.) When terrorism as a goal truly becomes too costly for the Iranian regime, jeopardizing lucrative relations with Western partners, the Iranian government itself will begin to crack down on those supporting terrorism. There is precedent for this exact scenario in President Musharraf’s Pakistan. Tied to the West by lucrative IMF loans and trade relations, Pakistan’s regime was quick to side with America against its former Taliban and al-Qaida clients. Under American pressure, President Musharraf has even cracked down on the Pakistani resistance groups that have waged terrorist attacks in the disputed Kashmir region.

If Iran was really preparing to rain nuclear missiles down on Tel Aviv, as Safire warned, of course there would be no question of detente. But Safire confuses rhetoric with reality. Iran does indeed want nuclear weapons, not as an offensive arsenal but as a defensive deterrent to foreign aggression. There is ample historical reason for this: During the eight-year war with Iraq, Iraqi bombs and missiles, supplied by America and other Western nations, mercilessly fell on Iranian cities, killing thousands of people. In the current environment of growing opposition at home and accelerated encirclement abroad, the mullahs of Iran are concerned more with self-preservation than exporting revolution. Launching nuclear attacks on Israel would be an act of suicide, resulting in the immediate annihilation of the Iranian regime at the hands of Israel and the U.S.

Moreover, the elected government of Mohammad Khatami and his foreign minister Kamal Kharazi have considerably softened on the issue of Israel and the peace process. President Khatami himself publicly hinted recently that if the Palestinian people choose to recognize Israel and reach a settlement, then Iran must accept this.

Inflammatory sermons by hard-line mullahs aside, a strong streak of pragmatism is discernible in Iran’s behavior. This is an important clue to the potential within the Iranian regime for constructive dialogue. Look at Iran’s actions on the ground over the last decade. During the Gulf War, when the region was aflame with anti-American sentiment, Iran stayed prudently on the sidelines. Iranian officials have brokered deals to help American hostages gain freedom in Lebanon. They have publicly distanced themselves from Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 death sentence against British writer Salman Rushdie. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has agreed to constant monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency, something other American allies such as Israel and Pakistan have refused to allow. Although it did not join the military effort against the Taliban, Iran did agree to cooperate with the United States on search and rescue efforts if American planes were shot down over Iran and opened a port to ship American wheat to the Afghan people. “By and large, the Iranian role diplomatically has been quite constructive,” according to the State Department’s director of policy planning, Richard N. Haass.

In short, Iran has some history as a peaceable member of the international community, although this behavior has not grabbed headlines like more extremist deeds and language. Moderate ayatollahs who resist extremism in Iran are not a myth, as the Bush administration would like us to believe in order to justify its hostile agenda.

Finally, there are powerful strategic and security concerns that argue for better relations with Iran. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, it has become clear that long-term peace and stability in the Middle East is not just a vague foreign policy objective but critical to our security as a nation. We have proven we are good at waging war. But as the Gulf War showed, sustaining a long-term, prosperous peace after victory is often more elusive. Saddam Hussein is still a threat over 10 years later. Forging appropriate friendships in the region will be as important as destroying adversaries. And by virtue of its geography, culture, and resources, Iran can exercise a singular influence over the region and help ensure our interests.

The modern Middle East is an unstable patchwork of artificial borders that were drawn by scheming colonial masters bent on dividing and ruling, not unifying and stabilizing. Although the region is one of the oldest inhabited places on Earth, the sovereign nation-state is a relatively new concept. Consider Iran’s immediate neighbors. They have spent the better part of the last 80 years as infant nations struggling to hold their fractious populations together. Iraq has its Kurds in the north and its Shia Muslims in the south. Afghanistan has its Uzbeks, Tajiks, Pashtuns and Hazaras. Pakistan has its Pashtuns, Balochis and Sindis. Even in relatively stable Turkey, the government has been waging a vicious war in the southeast against breakaway Kurds. The fledgling “–stan” nations of the Caucasus region to Iran’s north are barely a decade old after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In this unruly neighborhood, Iran has a key attribute that few have: a potent national identity stretching back over 2,000 years, transcending religious, ethnic and sectarian differences. Iran has its own Kurdish, Azeri Turk, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Armenian communities. But all Iranians, including these groups, share a fierce, almost ethnocentric national pride. They consider themselves a race ethnically and linguistically distinct from Semitic Arabs or Turks. This common consciousness within the mind of each Iranian creates a collective stability that can act as an anchor in an otherwise balkanized region.

Iran’s geography also makes it important to our strategic objectives in the region after 9/11. As Gary Sick, former national security chief under President Carter, has pointed out, Iran is uniquely located between the “twin towers” of terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has exercised an important influence over both nations and their internal politics for millennia. Moreover, Iran’s interests in these countries are now more than ever aligned with America’s.

The Bush administration claims that Iran is meddling in Afghanistan and trying to destabilize the fledgling government there, with the aim of ensuring a more religious state. But these reports — which have been categorically denied by Tehran — are highly unlikely to be true. Destabilizing Afghanistan is not in Iran’s interest. Why would Iran want to destabilize an Afghan government that it already has some influence over through its longtime client, the Northern Alliance, one of the most powerful constituencies within the Karzai regime? And why would it want to re-install a Sunni religious regime that would more than likely be hostile to its Shiite brand of Islam? This reasoning extends to allegations that Iran may be giving sanctuary to al-Qaida members. The clerics of Iran have little reason to harbor escapees whose puritanical, Wahhabi strain of Islam they find abhorrent.

Indeed, in response to Bush administration allegations that Iran was harboring al-Qaida members, Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi extended an unprecedented invitation to U.S. agents to come to Iran, share their intelligence and help the Iranian authorities root out al-Qaida. The American response to Kharrazi’s overture: silence. It seems the Bush administration is more comfortable with Iran as an enemy even if the Islamic Republic’s behavior contradicts this image.

What Iran is concerned with is its growing encirclement by American-backed regimes and the presence of U.S. forces near its borders. Its border “mischief” of late is sphere-of-influence jockeying, not a coordinated move against the nascent Afghan government. After all, America has scored two impressive military victories over Iran’s close neighbors in the last 10 years. It is the spread of American influence in its neighborhood that Iran fears. If we can establish some level of trust with the Khatami government, far from being a nuisance, a friendly Iran could influence the Northern Alliance leaders to work more smoothly with the Karzai coalition for a stable Afghanistan. A maker of mischief would become a guarantor of peace and prosperity in a war-torn land.

But perhaps the best indication of Iran’s positive intentions in Afghanistan is its commitment to rebuild the war-shattered nation. Iran has pledged $560 million over three years, making it the single largest contributor in the world. Of course, self-interest is involved, as it is with every nation’s foreign policy — but unless the U.S. makes Iran its enemy, that self-interest need not be threatening to U.S. interests.

Iran could also play a vital role in America’s dealings with Iraq. Under the ruthless rule of Saddam Hussein, Iran’s western neighbor has long been the premier outlaw state in the region and may be next on America’s list in the war on terror. Iran fought a bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s and has no love for a regime that supports dissident anti-Iranian guerilla groups. At the same time, Iran has broad political and spiritual influence with the clear majority of Iraqis who belong to the Shia sect of Islam. In fact, this influence was a major factor in the U.S. decision not to overthrow Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War: We feared a pro-Iranian state would replace him. By befriending a moderate Iran that fear would disappear. A friendly Iran could influence Shia dissident groups to work more closely with other factions in Iraq, such as the Kurds, for a pluralist, stable nation.

World energy security is another area where a relationship with Iran would pay huge dividends. Iran is the third largest exporter of oil in the world and contains 15 percent of global natural gas reserves. It is strategically located just south of the Caspian and Central Asian regions and could shore up the stability of those areas while reducing the transport costs of their massive oil and gas reserves to Western markets. The cheapest pipeline route from the Caspian region to the Persian Gulf is indisputably through Iran. By relying more heavily on Iranian, Caspian and Central Asian petroleum resources, America could ultimately reduce its own dependence on Saudi oil and the complex Arab-Israeli politics that accompany it.

But peace and stability in the Middle East and security for America will not only depend on the strength of our strategic alliances with Iran and other nations. We have strong relations with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but this did not prevent Saudi and Egyptian nationals from committing the atrocities of 9/11. In fact, it was these exact relationships that motivated our attackers. Political dissent in Egypt and Saudi Arabia has been summarily crushed since their creation as nations. It was only a matter of time before it became radicalized and boiled over to strike what is perceived as the main patron of the Egyptian and Saudi regimes — the United States.

Although most Muslims find Osama bin Laden’s tactics and worldview abhorrent, he does articulate a legitimate grievance against America from the Muslim perspective: How can the Bush administration make no distinction between terrorists and those who support or harbor them at the same time that it gives billions each year in military aid to nations, such as Egypt and Israel, that systematically wage terror against populations under their control? The hypocrisy only becomes more glaring when the Bush administration claims that there is no such thing as a “good terrorist” or a “bad terrorist.” For many Muslims, there clearly has been a distinction in the mind-set of American leaders for some time. So far we are losing the war for hearts and minds in the Middle East.

A rehabilitated relationship with Iran could help win that war. Many Muslims believe, rightly or wrongly, that America is trying to secularize the politics of the Muslim world, to strip Muslims of their religion. Why else would America support countries like Turkey and Algeria even after military juntas in both nations squashed peaceful Islamic movements that had won free and fair elections? From the Muslim perspective this is a double standard: When Islamic political parties play by the West’s rules of liberal democracy and win, they are quietly removed from power.

Forcibly purging Islam from the political spectrum, whether it is a conscious strategy or not, is not the answer. It has been tried in the past, creating a backlash that only aggravated the political landscape. Both Turkey and Iran experimented with forced secularization in the first half of the 20th century. In Iran, it only contributed to a violent Islamic revolution. In Turkey, it led to a cabal of generals wielding entirely too much political influence in a nation where the only grass-roots political organization is still the Islamist Virtue party. Excluding Islam, a religion intimately intertwined with politics since its inception, from political life will only radicalize the tactics of its adherents, as has already happened in Egypt and Algeria.

Alternatively, by including Islamic political parties within the political development process, you do two things. You begin to reinvent Islam, rationalizing a religion that, unlike Christianity, has never experienced a reformation with the modern world of tolerance and civil liberties. You also reinvent Western democracy, making it more culturally authentic in the eyes of its Muslims citizens.

Today, Iran is the only country in the Middle East that is experimenting with highly potent forms of both democracy and Islam. It is also the only nation in the region whose people have waged a successful revolution against the tyranny that is such a common component of Middle Eastern governments. This has created perhaps the most charged political atmosphere in the region. It has given Iran the chance to politically evolve like no other state in the history of the Middle East. Unlike in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the people of Iran have peaceful means of articulating their dissent within the political system. They do not need to resort to acts of terrorism at home or abroad. They can vote conservatives out of office, as they did in overwhelming numbers in the recent presidential and parliamentary elections. They can express their views in one of the reformist newspapers that, despite periodic government crackdowns, have made Iran’s print media the most vibrant in the region.

This political environment makes Iran breathe like no other nation in the region. However committed the ruling clerics are to preserving Islamic restrictions in Iran, there is a natural limit to their repression. What is little understood in the United States is that the Islamic revolution was waged against oppression and for accountable government. The clerics cannot be seen to betray the same principles that they themselves fought for.

Perhaps most intriguing of all is the fact that there are no clear-cut battle lines in this war between conservatives and reformers in Iran. Many of the most outspoken reformists are also respected members of the conservative religious establishment. This is a telling measure of how much Iran has evolved since the days of the revolution and how infected with change even the Iranian clerical groups have become. Take Ayatollah Hosein-Ali Montazeri, for instance. In the early years after the revolution, Montazeri was Khomeini’s heir apparent and one of the architects of Islamic rule. He preached global Islamic revolution and was a conduit for funds to terrorist groups around the world. Today, Montazeri is one of the fiercest opponents of the ruling clerics, openly criticizing their autocratic rule and personally attacking the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, himself. Although he has been reprimanded, the ruling clerics do not have the power to completely silence him. Drawing from a venerated tradition of competitive argument and independent judgment that has its roots in the Shia brand of Islam, he continues to critique clerical rule.

In other words, in Iran, it is not only the political landscape that is being transformed. Islam itself is being re-created, as some clerics call for a reinterpretation of the faith to accommodate the demands of modern life. Others call for a wholesale withdrawal of the mullahs from government. What is slowly emerging from this conflict is a wholly authentic blend of Islamic and democratic values that Iran’s people can call their own. In a region of political underdeveloped and despotic nations, Iran could be a model for stable, accountable government — a government that shares both America’s democratic values and its strategic interests.

I have many more reasons than most Americans to hate the Islamic Republic of Iran. After the revolution the new regime seized my family’s pharmaceuticals company with a nonchalant wave of the hand, stripping my father and his brothers of their life’s work, a business they had created from selling cough syrup door-to-door. Worse, like many Iranians, my family was wrenched from our cherished homeland and splintered across the globe as perpetual exiles.

It is easy to hate. It is easy to punish, to ignore, to attack and criticize. It is much harder to sit down, work out differences and develop trust. So far, both America and Iran have taken the easy way out. This is understandable, given the legitimate grievances both countries have against one another. But these misdeeds are well in the past. A new generation of reform-minded Iranians reminds us of our own struggles for freedom as a young nation. We should nurture, not spurn them. Moreover, showing that we can reach out, even to the fundamentalist nation that slapped us in the face 22 years ago, would send an enlightened, mature message to the rest of the Islamic world. With our encouragement, Iran could yet reinvent itself as one of the few democratic states in the Middle East, one that is also comfortable with its Muslim heritage. And that would be a victory for the future of Islam and democracy.

This deal would have been a major diplomatic breakthrough. It would have greatly reduced Iran’s capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, defused tensions in the region, calmed the oil markets, driven prices at the pump down and made it impossible for Netanyahu to attack Iran. In a presidential campaign as tight as this one, a significant drop in gas prices could be the difference between Obama being reelected and Romney defeating him. So why didn’t the Obama administration take the deal?

The ostensible reason, piously mouthed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that the U.S. believes that the upcoming, even harsher round of sanctions on Tehran will generate even further concessions. According to this line of reasoning, Iran only came to the bargaining table because of sanctions, and more sanctions will produce better results.

But this justification is transparently false. First, Iran has made it clear again and again that it will never allow itself to be seen as folding under U.S. pressure. It is prepared to negotiate, but successful diplomacy requires not just sticks but carrots. The carrot the P5+1 offered at Baghdad was ridiculous: If the Iranians agreed to suspend 20 percent enrichment, what they would receive in return was not a reduction in sanctions, but rather spare aircraft parts. For Tehran, accepting this deal would have been tantamount to surrendering. As Iranian analyst Hasan Abadini said, “Giving up 20 percent enrichment levels in return for plane spare parts is a joke.” These are not arcane diplomatic mysteries. As Iran expert Gary Sick pointed out in an interview on NPR, what it will take to reach a resolution of this issue is clearly understood by all the players involved. It is no more possible that the Iranians would have taken that deal than that the Palestinians would agree to establish their state in Jordan.

Second, Clinton’s argument that the Iranians will make more concessions begs the question: what concessions? The only remaining significant concession Iran could make would be to agree to give up enriching uranium altogether – and it has made it clear that it is never going to give up that right, which it is guaranteed as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Agreement. In an interview with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, former Iranian negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian made it clear that Iran would be prepared to give up 20 percent enrichment if its rights to enrich uranium were recognized.

All of this makes clear that the U.S. knew going into the negotiations that they were not going to succeed. The entire process was an elaborate ritual whose dual purpose was to inoculate President Obama against charges that he was “soft on Tehran” and to make it impossible for Netanyahu to go postal.

In fact, despite the conventional wisdom, it is extremely unlikely that the far-right Israeli leader will attack Iran. His constant threats to do so were the reason that Congress imposed the latest round of sanctions, against the Obama administration’s wishes. But despite Congress’s lockstep support for Netanyahu and anything he decides to do, up to and including an attack on Iran, it would be far too risky for Netanyahu to actually do it. The American people, unlike their bought-off, coerced and/or ideologically myopic political representatives, are sick of Middle East wars. Many, including increasing numbers of American Jews, are growing weary of Israeli intransigence and extremism. They’re also broke. An Israeli attack on Iran would draw in the U.S. and plunge the world into a depression – and the American people would hold Israel to account. Netanyahu may, as the former head of Israel’s spy service said, be “messianic,” but even he knows better than to jeopardize his country’s relationship with America. However, in order to manipulate America, it is essential that he constantly give the impression that he is about to attack Iran.

The Obama administration probably knows that Netanyahu is bluffing. But it has to play out this farce to placate Congress, keep pro-Israel Democrats writing checks, remove a Romney attack line and generally appear tough on Iran.

The irony is that the U.S. and Israel are always claiming that Iran uses negotiations over its nuclear program to play for time while it works feverishly to develop a bomb. But playing for time is precisely what the U.S. just did.

Obama is trying to run out the clock on Iran before the November election. He adroitly stalled the nuke-Iran hysteria that built up during the AIPAC conference in March, but he did so at a price, painting himself into a corner with tough rhetoric denying that containment of a nuclear Iran was an option and threatening to use military force. The negotiations in Baghdad had to fail in order for him to maintain that posture.

His strategy may work. He may stumble over the finish line in November, still dragging out negotiations. And he may overcome the serious headwind of high gas prices and beat Romney. But there is nothing good to be said about his weak and pandering approach. It will not stop the Iranian nuclear program, it is causing the Iranian people to suffer, and it hurts the average U.S. citizen. At bottom, it is an approach predicated not on achieving real progress in dealing with the Tehran regime but on overthrowing it. As such, it is antithetical to Obama’s proclaimed desire to reach out to Iran and to reset America’s relationship with the Middle East. In the long run, he will have to decide whether he really wants to continue a brinkmanship game that locks the U.S. into the self-defeating Middle East policies it pursued during the Bush years.

For the truth is that Obama’s Iran policy represents the last vestige of Bush-era neoconservative extremism. The moralistic, shrill, militaristic Manichean worldview that brought us the “Axis of Evil” and the Iraq war is gone – except when it comes to Iran.

Obama’s schizoid foreign policy – extreme and ideological on Iran, pragmatic and flexible everywhere else — was brought into sharp relief this week. Even as the Baghdad summit broke down, events elsewhere in the Middle East and South Asia demonstrated the utter failure of Bush’s approach – and provided a cautionary warning to Obama of the follies of continuing it with Iran.

Start with Iraq, where Bush’s nine-year-long military adventure is coming to an inglorious end. That unprovoked invasion was supposed to bring an end to an evil regime and transform the Middle East – the same reasons neocons now give for attacking Iran. It left an ethnically fractured, horribly wounded land in the grip of a strongman that is just now emerging from a nightmarish civil war and is still plagued by sectarian violence and terrorism. Our moral responsibility predates the war: America’s crippling pre-war sanctions devastated Iraq’s entire society, and they were one of the reasons why it was so difficult to rebuild it. Congressional proponents of sanctions against Iran should take note.

Then there’s Afghanistan, where after 11 agonizing years we have essentially given up. Afghanistan has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that even a superpower cannot always succeed in imposing its will, that cultural and anthropological differences are critical, and that trying to combine nation building and counterinsurgency in one of the most backward and impoverished places on Earth is a recipe for disaster. The best we can hope for now is that not too many more U.S. troops are shot dead by the Afghans they are training – and that the Taliban does not roll into Kabul the moment we roll out.

Next there’s Syria, where an appalling regime is locked in a brutal struggle with a murky opposition and where all the options are so bad that we have no choice but to remain on the sidelines.

Finally, there’s Egypt, where a nascent democracy is fighting to be born. Everything about this inspiring, painful and threatened revolution, culminating in this week’s elections, was generated by the Egyptian people themselves. America had nothing to do with it. Contrary to claims made by Bush apologists, the appalling example of Iraq was actually a disincentive to throw off Mubarak’s tyranny. As for the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, that dire event so feared by neoconservatives and Islamophobes, they may turn out to be the stable, conservative, don’t-rock-the-boat party.

The lessons these different situations hold for our dealings with Iran are very simple. First, we have far less ability to control what happens in the Middle East than we think. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to impose our will directly and failed. In the other two, we either do not have the ability to intervene (Egypt) or the risks of doing so would be too high (Syria). Second, none of these situations are susceptible to the kind of good-and-evil moralizing that characterized Bush’s approach to the Middle East. Individually they are incredibly complex, and as a whole they are even more complex. There is no simple way to approach any of them. Basing our policy toward them on a Manichaean, good guys vs. bad guys worldview is self-defeating. Bashir Assad is a bad guy, but if we sided with the rebels, we could unleash a civil war even more catastrophic than the one going on now. Some of the Salafis in Egypt may be planning to ban beer and abrogate the Camp David treaty, but if we tried to prevent them from taking power, we would be thwarting the will of those Egyptian people who want those outcomes. Nouri al-Maliki may be a sectarian thug, but the alternative could be worse. Hamid Karzai may be a corrupt, drug-addled charlatan, but he’s the guy who’s there.

And so on, down the list, from Pakistan to Hamas to Netanyahu to Libya. The real world, as opposed to the black-and-white world of the neocons, is all about complexity, grey areas, compromises, diplomacy, flexibility. It’s about accepting that America will have to deal with regimes that do not toe our line. It’s about realizing that our soft power is more effective than our military power. It’s about putting down the Big Stick and trying to actually listen to what the people in the region are saying. It’s the opposite of the Bush Doctrine.

Obama knows this, but the dead hand of neoconservative ideology still drives his Iran policy. Until he shakes it off and accepts that Iran is a regional power and must be dealt with realistically, even though it does not always share our interests, his Middle East policy will continue to resemble that of his predecessor.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict — all tied to energy supplies — that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

* A brewing war between Sudan and South Sudan: On April 10th, forces from the newly independent state of South Sudan occupied the oil center of Heglig, a town granted to Sudan as part of a peace settlement that allowed the southerners to secede in 2011.  The northerners, based in Khartoum, then mobilized their own forces and drove the South Sudanese out of Heglig.  Fighting has since erupted all along the contested border between the two countries, accompanied by air strikes on towns in South Sudan.  Although the fighting has not yet reached the level of a full-scale war, international efforts to negotiate a cease-fire and a peaceful resolution to the dispute have yet to meet with success.

This conflict is being fueled by many factors, including economic disparities between the two Sudans and an abiding animosity between the southerners (who are mostly black Africans and Christians or animists) and the northerners (mostly Arabs and Muslims).  But oil — and the revenues produced by oil — remains at the heart of the matter.  When Sudan was divided in 2011, the most prolific oil fields wound up in the south, while the only pipeline capable of transporting the south’s oil to international markets (and thus generating revenue) remained in the hands of the northerners.  They have been demanding exceptionally high “transit fees” — $32-$36 per barrel compared to the common rate of $1 per barrel — for the privilege of bringing the South’s oil to market.  When the southerners refused to accept such rates, the northerners confiscated money they had already collected from the south’s oil exports, its only significant source of funds.  In response, the southerners stopped producing oil altogether and, it appears, launched their military action against the north.  The situation remains explosive.

* Naval clash in the South China Sea: On April 7th, a Philippine naval warship, the 378-foot Gregorio del Pilar, arrived at Scarborough Shoal, a small island in the South China Sea, and detained eight Chinese fishing boats anchored there, accusing them of illegal fishing activities in Filipino sovereign waters.  China promptly sent two naval vessels of its own to the area, claiming that the Gregorio del Pilar was harassing Chinese ships in Chinese, not Filipino waters.  The fishing boats were eventually allowed to depart without further incident and tensions have eased somewhat.  However, neither side has displayed any inclination to surrender its claim to the island, and both sides continue to deploy warships in the contested area.

As in Sudan, multiple factors are driving this clash, but energy is the dominant motive.  The South China Sea is thought to harbor large deposits of oil and natural gas, and all the countries that encircle it, including China and the Philippines, want to exploit these reserves.  Manila claims a 200-nautical mile “exclusive economic zone” stretching into the South China Sea from its western shores, an area it calls the West Philippine Sea; Filipino companies say they have found large natural gas reserves in this area and have announced plans to begin exploiting them.  Claiming the many small islands that dot the South China Sea (including Scarborough Shoal) as its own, Beijing has asserted sovereignty over the entire region, including the waters claimed by Manila; it, too, has announced plans to drill in the area.  Despite years of talks, no solution has yet been found to the dispute and further clashes are likely.

* Egypt cuts off the natural gas flow to Israel: On April 22nd, the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation and Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company informed Israeli energy officials that they were “terminating the gas and purchase agreement” under which Egypt had been supplying gas to Israel.  This followed months of demonstrations in Cairo by the youthful protestors who succeeded in deposing autocrat Hosni Mubarak and are now seeking a more independent Egyptian foreign policy — one less beholden to the United States and Israel.  It also followed scores of attacks on the pipelines carrying the gas across the Negev Desert to Israel, which the Egyptian military has seemed powerless to prevent.

Ostensibly, the decision was taken in response to a dispute over Israeli payments for Egyptian gas, but all parties involved have interpreted it as part of a drive by Egypt’s new government to demonstrate greater distance from the ousted Mubarak regime and his (U.S.-encouraged) policy of cooperation with Israel.  The Egyptian-Israeli gas link was one of the most significant outcomes of the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries, and its annulment clearly signals a period of greater discord; it may also cause energy shortages in Israel, especially during peak summer demand periods.  On a larger scale, the cutoff suggests a new inclination to use energy (or its denial) as a form of political warfare and coercion.

* Argentina seizes YPF: On April 16th, Argentina’s president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, announced that her government would seize a majority stake in YPF, the nation’s largest oil company.  Under President Kirchner’s plans, which she detailed on national television, the government would take a 51% controlling stake in YPF, which is now majority-owned by Spain’s largest corporation, the energy firm Repsol YPF.  The seizure of its Argentinean subsidiary is seen in Madrid (and other European capitals) as a major threat that must now be combated.  Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel García Margallo, said that Kirchner’s move “broke the climate of cordiality and friendship that presided over relations between Spain and Argentina.”  Several days later, in what is reported to be only the first of several retaliatory steps, Spain announced that it would stop importing biofuels from Argentina, its principal supplier — a trade worth nearly $1 billion a year to the Argentineans.
As in the other conflicts, this clash is driven by many urges, including a powerful strain of nationalism stretching back to the Peronist era, along with Kirchner’s apparent desire to boost her standing in the polls.  Just as important, however, is Argentina’s urge to derive greater economic and political benefit from its energy reserves, which include the world’s third-largest deposits of shale gas.  While long-term rival Brazil is gaining immense power and prestige from the development of its offshore “pre-salt” petroleum reserves, Argentina has seen its energy production languish.  Repsol may not be to blame for this, but many Argentineans evidently believe that, with YPF under government control, it will now be possible to accelerate development of the country’s energy endowment, possibly in collaboration with a more aggressive foreign partner like BP or ExxonMobil.

* Argentina re-ignites the Falklands crisis: At an April 15th-16th Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia — the one at which U.S. Secret Service agents were caught fraternizing with prostitutes — Argentina sought fresh hemispheric condemnation of Britain’s continued occupation of the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by the Argentineans).  It won strong support from every country present save (predictably) Canada and the United States.  Argentina, which says the islands are part of its sovereign territory, has been raising this issue ever since it lost a war over the Falklands in 1982, but has recently stepped up its campaign on several fronts — denouncing London in numerous international venues and preventing British cruise ships that visit the Falklands from docking in Argentinean harbors.  The British have responded by beefing up their military forces in the region and warning the Argentineans to avoid any rash moves.

When Argentina and the U.K. fought their war over the Falklands, little was at stake save national pride, the stature of the country’s respective leaders (Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher vs. an unpopular military junta), and a few sparsely populated islands.  Since then, the stakes have risen immeasurably as a result of recent seismic surveys of the waters surrounding the islands that indicated the existence of massive deposits of oil and natural gas.  Several UK-based energy firms, including Desire Petroleum and Rockhopper Exploration, have begun off-shore drilling in the area and have reported promising discoveries.  Desperate to duplicate Brazil’s success in the development of offshore oil and gas, Argentina claims the discoveries lie in its sovereign territory and that the drilling there is illegal; the British, of course, insist that it’s their territory.  No one knows how this simmering potential crisis will unfold, but a replay of the 1982 war — this time over energy — is hardly out of the question.

* U.S. forces mobilize for war with Iran: Throughout the winter and early spring, it appeared that an armed clash of some sort pitting Iran against Israel and/or the United States was almost inevitable.  Neither side seemed prepared to back down on key demands, especially on Iran’s nuclear program, and any talk of a compromise solution was deemed unrealistic.  Today, however, the risk of war has diminished somewhat — at least through this election year in the U.S. — as talks have finally gotten under way between the major powers and Iran, and as both have adopted (slightly) more accommodating stances.  In addition, U.S. officials have been tamping down war talk and figures in the Israeli military and intelligence communities have spoken out against rash military actions.  However, the Iranians continue to enrich uranium, and leaders on all sides say they are fully prepared to employ force if the peace talks fail.

For the Iranians, this means blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which one-third of the world’s tradable oil passes every day.  The U.S., for its part, has insisted that it will keep the Strait open and, if necessary, eliminate Iranian nuclear capabilities.  Whether to intimidate Iran, prepare for the real thing, or possibly both, the U.S. has been building up its military capabilities in the Persian Gulf area, deploying two aircraft carrier battle groups in the neighborhood along with an assortment of air and amphibious-assault capabilities.

One can debate the extent to which Washington’s long-running feud with Iran is driven by oil, but there is no question that the current crisis bears heavily on global oil supply prospects, both through Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation for forthcoming sanctions on Iranian oil exports, and the likelihood that any air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities will lead to the same thing.  Either way, the U.S. military would undoubtedly assume the lead role in destroying Iranian military capabilities and restoring oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. This is the energy-driven crisis that just won’t go away.

How Energy Drives the World

All of these disputes have one thing in common: the conviction of ruling elites around the world that the possession of energy assets — especially oil and gas deposits — is essential to prop up national wealth, power, and prestige.

This is hardly a new phenomenon.  Early in the last century, Winston Churchill was perhaps the first prominent leader to appreciate the strategic importance of oil.  As First Lord of the Admiralty, he converted British warships from coal to oil and then persuaded the cabinet to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of British Petroleum (now BP).  The pursuit of energy supplies for both industry and war-fighting played a major role in the diplomacy of the period between the World Wars, as well as in the strategic planning of the Axis powers during World War II.  It also explains America’s long-term drive to remain the dominant power in the Persian Gulf that culminated in the first Gulf War of 1990-91 and its inevitable sequel, the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The years since World War II have seen a variety of changes in the energy industry, including a shift in many areas from private to state ownership of oil and natural gas reserves.  By and large, however, the industry has been able to deliver ever-increasing quantities of fuel to satisfy the ever-growing needs of a globalizing economy and an expanding, rapidly urbanizing world population.  So long as supplies were abundant and prices remained relatively affordable, energy consumers around the world, including most governments, were largely content with the existing system of collaboration among private and state-owned energy leviathans.

But that energy equation is changing ominously as the challenge of fueling the planet grows more difficult.  Many of the giant oil and gas fields that quenched the world’s energy thirst in years past are being depleted at a rapid pace.  The new fields being brought on line to take their place are, on average, smaller and harder to exploit.  Many of the most promising new sources of energy — like Brazil’s “pre-salt” petroleum reserves deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, Canadian tar sands, and American shale gas — require the utilization of sophisticated and costly technologies.  Though global energy supplies are continuing to grow, they are doing so at a slower pace than in the past and are continually falling short of demand.  All this adds to the upward pressure on prices, causing anxiety among countries lacking adequate domestic reserves (and joy among those with an abundance).

The world has long been bifurcated between energy-surplus and energy-deficit states, with the former deriving enormous political and economic advantages from their privileged condition and the latter struggling mightily to escape their subordinate position.  Now, that bifurcation is looking more like a chasm.  In such a global environment, friction and conflict over oil and gas reserves — leading to energy conflicts of all sorts — is only likely to increase.

Looking, again, at April’s six energy disputes, one can see clear evidence of these underlying forces in every case.  South Sudan is desperate to sell its oil in order to acquire the income needed to kick-start its economy; Sudan, on the other hand, resents the loss of oil revenues it controlled when the nation was still united, and appears no less determined to keep as much of the South’s oil money as it can for itself.  China and the Philippines both want the right to develop oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea, and even if the deposits around Scarborough Shoal prove meager, China is unwilling to back down in any localized dispute that might undermine its claim to sovereignty over the entire region.

Egypt, although not a major energy producer, clearly seeks to employ its oil and gas supplies for maximum political and economic advantage — an approach sure to be copied by other small and mid-sized suppliers.  Israel, heavily dependent on imports for its energy, must now turn elsewhere for vital supplies or accelerate the development of disputed, newly discovered offshore gas fields, a move that could provoke fresh conflict with Lebanon, which says they lie in its own territorial waters.  And Argentina, jealous of Brazil’s growing clout, appears determined to extract greater advantage from its own energy resources, even if this means inflaming tensions with Spain and Great Britain.

And these are just some of the countries involved in significant disputes over energy.  Any clash with Iran — whatever the motivation — is bound to jeopardize the petroleum supply of every oil-importing country, sparking a major international crisis with unforeseeable consequences.  China’s determination to control its offshore hydrocarbon reserves has pushed it into conflict with other countries with offshore claims in the South China Sea, and into a similar dispute with Japan in the East China Sea.  Energy-related disputes of this sort can also be found in the Caspian Sea and in globally warming, increasingly ice-free Arctic regions.

The seeds of energy conflicts and war sprouting in so many places simultaneously suggest that we are entering a new period in which key state actors will be more inclined to employ force — or the threat of force — to gain control over valuable deposits of oil and natural gas.  In other words, we’re now on a planet heading into energy overdrive.

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But the NYPD’s “covertly follow every single Muslim in the tri-state area” approach to counter-terrorism has its defenders. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who believes Americans Muslims have the right to worship wherever they see fit so long as they don’t pay any attention to the unmarked vans parked across the street.

And the department argues that it is allowed to carry out surveillance wherever it chooses, because there’s no law against just going around looking at things and taking some pictures, right? No, of course not, unless you look sort of Middle Eastern.

The NYPD earlier this week announced that they had totally caught some people who were almost definitely probably Iranian spies. These spies were caught red-handed spying all over the place!

Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran’s government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

The NYPD’s Mitchell Silber told Congress that Hezbollah and Iran definitely want to blow up New York, and the proof is three incidents of people “associated with the Iranian government” getting caught photographing things, in New York. (I am not much of a terrorist, but if you want pictures of New York City landmarks in order to figure out how best to blow them up why not try Flickr? There are hundreds of thousands of photos of every landmark in the city already online!)

While other so-called intelligence experts say ” there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.,” Long Island-based Islamaphobe Republican Congressman Peter King and documented supporter of terrorism wants us all to be on high alert, because Hezbollah is everywhere:

Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”

Stop telling the NYPD not to spy on all the Muslims, everywhere! If they don’t keep tabs on all of them, the Iranians will get us!

Hadley was speaking at a panel at the University of Maryland, alongside former Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski went further, saying that even if Iran did obtain nuclear weapons, it could be contained. According to Brzezinski, who was the top policymaker during the time of the Iran revolution and hostage crisis in 1979 and 1980, a nuclear Iran is something the world can live with. “Deterrence needs to be given a chance to work,” he said. “The Iranians are devious, but they are not suicidal.”

The panel was moderated by Shibley Telhami, a veteran pollster and scholar on the Middle East. Telhami released a poll finding that only one in four Americans favor Israel conducting a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. Close to 70 percent favor the U.S. and other major powers continuing to pursue negotiations with Iran, a position that is supported by majorities of Republicans (58 percent), Democrats (79 percent) and Independents (67 percent). The poll, conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, found only 14 percent of respondents said the U.S. should encourage Israel to strike Iran’s program. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, said, “One of the reasons Americans are so cool toward the idea of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear program is that most believe that it is not likely to produce much benefit.”

Brzezinski agreed heartily. “We have no idea how such a war would end,” he said. “Iran has military capabilities, it could retaliate by destabilizing Iraq.”

Hadley was much more worried about the consequences of a nuclear Iran. “Iran is different than North Korea, which is more inward-directed,” he said. “I worry that they would be more ambitious in support of terrorism and that other countries” in the region would also want nuclear weapons. Still, Hadley believes that the Obama administration has been pursuing the right approach with Iran, focusing on sanctions instead of opting for military action. Even if covert action or taking other approaches to delaying Iran’s nuclear weapons program only worked for two or three years, that would be worth it, he said.

“The Iranian public is watching what is going on in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya,” he said. Delaying a military strike may offer a chance for something to change in Iran, either through diplomacy or through the leadership’s reconsideration of its foreign-affairs approach. He believes Iran’s recent agreement to nuclear talks came as a result of increasing pressure on the regime.

Brzezinski is worried about a situation whereby Iran is forced to choose between a humiliating retreat and crippling sanctions. Such an ultimatum offers no chance for the regime to take a face-saving retreat, similar to how the Soviet Union was granted concessions in return for removing its missiles from Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. “The Israelis have been predicting since 1994 every year that Iran will have nuclear weapons the next year,” he said. While the United States has a rightful moral obligation toward Israel, Brzezinski said, offering it protection under America’s nuclear umbrella and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the best way to integrate it permanently into the international community.

In contrast to some top Republicans, Hadley said that America should engage with Islamist and Muslim political parties that have gained power in Egypt and elsewhere. “Just because they have the word ‘Islamic’ or ‘Muslim’ in the name — we should be pushing them to pursue pluralism,” he said.

Hadley’s comments are a marker of how top Bush administration official have been chastened by the Iraq disaster. With the important exception of Cheney and Rumsfeld, all seem to admit that the war did not go as planned — to the extent that it was planned). One of the few good things to come out of the Iraq war is that it has cautioned American leaders against starting another.

In a rhetorical style that was less hostile than usual, Ayatollah Khamenei hailed Obama’s comments as “good words” and called them “an exit from delusion.” Meanwhile, his nuclear negotiator, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, resumed talks in Vienna over Iran’s controversial nuclear program with five western powers including China for the first time in more than a year. He called the talks “a new chapter.”

Both seemed to be efforts to divert threats at a time when hawks in Israel are beating the drums of war and calling for a military strike as soon as spring to stop Iran from making a nuclear bomb. Sanctions are crippling Iran’s economy and the value of its currency, the rial, has plunged since fall to half against the U.S. dollar.  

It is too early to take Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments as an overture to the West. “I think we have to wait and see if anything will come out of the nuclear talks,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “So far he just seemed glad that war is not imminent.”

The victory of Ayatollah Khamenei’s supporters in the March 2 elections has, at least symbolically, solidified his authority. According to official figures, his supporters won 75 percent of the seats. The fate of the remaining 65 seats in the 290-member assembly will be decided in run-off elections.

The fact that supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won only 2 seats, compared to 70 percent of the seats in 2008, is being interpreted as nothing but a clear victory for Ayatollah Khamenei.

Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the final word on state matters, has made Ahmadinejad a target after he challenged his authority. The president tried to reopen relations with the United States, despite opposition from the supreme leader, believing that rapprochement with the West would be popular with Iranian electorate. He appointed his supporters to key ministries that had been historically controlled by the supreme leader. Ayatollah Khamenei lashed back late last year and publically embarrassed the president by reappointing the Intelligence Minister whom Ahmadinejad had fired.

The elections were not only about sidelining Ahmadinejad, but also restoring the prestige and an image of strength to the supreme leader. In the days before the election, Ayatollah Khamenei was concerned only with turn out. The elections were the first since the 2009 presidential race that triggered massive anti-regime protests. Khamenei had gone to extreme lengths to support Ahmadinejad against pro-reform forces that demanded more political and social openness.

Before the vote this month, Ayatollah Khamenei urged people to vote in large numbers to “smack the face” of the enemies, a reference to Israel and the United States. His supporters equated low turnout with an invitation for a military strike, because a low turnout would project an image of weakness at a time when the country had come under increasing threats.

The opposition movement that drew hundreds of thousands into the streets boycotted the election and urged its supporters to stay away from the polls. Their candidates were banned from running and their leaders have been under house arrest for the past year.

No independent reporting confirmed the 64 percent turnout. The regime boasted that it was an “epic victory,” compared to 57 percent that voted in parliamentary votes in 2008. Foreign reporters were not allowed to roam freely and were bused to specific polling stations where they were greeted with enthusiastic voters.

Apathy among the large middle-class generated almost no citizen journalism except for calls from Iran to a call-in program on BBC Persian Service that was beamed into Iran on satellite. Callers said the polling places in Tehran and large cities were deserted.

The contrasting numbers that the government released in the early hours of the count failed to convince people it was different from the 2009 election that was widely viewed as fraudulent. One government official put the turnout at 34 percent while the Interior Minister, Mostafa Najar, said it was 64 percent. Eventually, the Interior Ministry, which was counting the votes, deleted the turnout figure all together from its website. The semi-official news agency, Mehr, even reported the total number of votes as being higher than the number of eligible voters in a small city of Ilam.

Although there were no immediate claims of irregularities, it was Ahmadinejad’s younger sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad, who vowed this time that she would make formal complaints of fraud in her hometown of Garmsar where she lost to a rival candidate.

As for Ahmadinejad, he will become the first president next week in the Islamic regime to be summoned before parliament to answer MP’s questions over alleged mismanagement. The move has been seen as an effort to curb his power. In another blow, the Guardian Council, a watchdog body close to Ayatollah Khamenei, blocked the president from setting up a committee responsible for supervising the implementation of the constitution. The committee would have given Ahmadinejad more leverage to ensure that, as president, he was given all the power the constitution granted him.