Fear and loathing in Tehran.

• Author: Maloney, Suzanne
• Position: Essay

LIKE MOM and apple pie, supporting democracy in Iran has universal appeal in U.S. politics. So it is predictable that the February 2006 surprise request by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for $75 million in supplemental funding to support the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people won ready bipartisan acclaim and the sort of unquestioningly adulatory U.S. media coverage that was all too rare for an administration mired in Iraq and increasingly on the defensive at home. The dramatic new initiative found favor with American pundits and policymakers because it offered something for everyone. It represented a low-cost, feel-good means of leveraging palpable dissatisfaction among Iran's young population and intensifying pressure on the regime--all while bolstering the administration's bona tides on its much-hyped "Freedom Agenda" and placating advocates of more aggressive action toward Tehran.

Rice's democracy initiative signaled a subtle but important transformation in America's approach--one that had long relied on isolation as the primary tool for containing the Islamic Republic. For the Bush Administration, the challenges posed by Iran were too urgent and its political trajectory too unpredictable to wait out its current leadership; moreover, even a more robust form of isolation failed to satisfy the administration's ideological predilections for idealistic interventionism. And so even as Washington reluctantly proffered tactical engagement with Tehran on Iraq and the nuclear question, the underlying rationale for American policy shifted in favor of direct U.S. efforts to influence the nature of the regime and the structure of power in Iran. This has not entailed a full-fledged American embrace of regime change--which Rice has disavowed pointedly even as reports of U.S. covert programs have surfaced in the media--but an amateurish array of programs and tactics intended to splinter Iran's political elite and strengthen its opponents. From the Iranian perspective, this may be a distinction without a difference.

Some of the assumptions that inform this new approach to Iran are not particularly controversial. That change in Iran is necessary--advancing both Iranian aspirations and American interests--is self-evident. But if the need for political change in Iran is uncontestable, the same cannot be said for the administration's chosen means for advancing it: Its self-imposed constraints on contact with Tehran and a hopelessly flawed, one-size-fits-all approach to democracy promotion.

The United States faces a two-fold problem: The legacy of bungled American involvement in Iran and a misreading of Iran's current political dynamics that stems from a worryingly familiar exaggeration of our ability, to shape positive outcomes in countries we know nothing about. Our efforts to open political space in Iran are helping to constrict it, exacerbate the persecution complex of Iran's revolutionaries and lessen the prospect for advancing diplomatic solutions to the Iranian challenge. Like other Bush Administration endeavors, a radical new policy that seemed like a "slam dunk" at home is imploding on implementation.

THE NATURE of Iran's Islamic regime is at the heart of Washington's concerns about Iranian policies. Yet until recently the impetus to reshape Tehran was restrained by the humbling U.S. experience in Iran, particularly the U.S. role in the 1953 coup that unseated Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh and reinstated the shah to the throne, and the limitations imposed by our lack of presence there. The Mossadegh episode profoundly affected Iran's future leaders, and its principal conclusion--a deep-seated suspicion toward external powers--became internalized within the state they created.

In the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, this legacy fed intense Iranian fears of an externally orchestrated countercoup, exacerbated by the unrest facing the post-revolutionary government. As a result, one of the Iranians' primary conditions for ending the 444-day U.S. hostage crisis was a pledge by Washington, incorporated in the 1981 Algiers agreement, "that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs." Although the United States appeared to consider the language purely ceremonial, it remains salient for Iranians, who routinely invoke the non-intervention pledge in protesting U.S. actions.

American trepidations about Iran's internal politics were reinforced in the 1980s by the disastrous consequences of the Iran-Contra affair, which was, in part, an attempt to restore American influence in an anticipated post-Khomeini era. Iran-Contra reminded U.S. policymakers that covert efforts to influence Iran's political future were likely futile and that interacting with any segment of the Iranian political elite was politically risky.

The United States continued to misread, miscalculate and disregard its painful historical experience. By the mid 1990s, partisan wrangling in Washington revived the desire to venture into Iran's treacherous political waters. House Speaker Newt Gingrich called...