Next stop, Tehran?

• Author: Toensing, Chris
• Position: Cover Story

Real men want to go to Tehran." So went the mordant barroom quip--variously attributed to Undersecretary of State John Bolton and other neoconservative hawks--during the long buildup to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein's ruling clique in Baghdad, it was said, would be only the first in a series of rogue regimes to get crushed under the Bush Administration's heel.

In the summer of 2003, the "real men" looked to be in the driver's seat. The Iraqi regime had fallen rapidly, without the bloody urban battles many had predicted. Iran, designated by President George W. Bush as one-third of the "axis of evil," was surrounded by U.S. troops in Afghanistan to the east and Iraq to the west, as well as the Fifth Fleet and multiple U.S. air bases in the Gulf States to the south. Neoconservatives at the Pentagon had prevailed over the State Department in internal Administration debates about the Iranian parliamentary reformists led by President Mohammad Khatami, with an Administration spokesman dismissing the reform current as "ineffective." The preceding summer, an Iranian opposition group had revealed a clandestine nuclear program in Iran that was further advanced than previously suspected. Sensing an opportunity, rightwing hawks like Michael Ledeen and Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute formed a "Coalition for Democracy in Iran" to agitate for regime change.

A year--and several bloody urban battles in Iraq--later, the talk of invading Iran has quieted down, for the time being, anyway. Bolton, loudest squawker of them all, is reportedly leaving the State Department. The Bush Administration's hostility to the Islamic Republic has only deepened, however, with the President accusing Iran of "meddling" in the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi elections, arming Iraqi insurgents, and lying to the world about its alleged intention to build an atomic bomb. While a U.S. attack on Iran is not around the corner, the regime-change crowd's fingers remain disconcertingly close to the trigger.

As with Iraq, gung-ho neoconservatives can count on members of Congress tied to the Christian right and the pro-Israel lobby to generate political pressure on the White House. In July, Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, introduced a bill calling upon "the United States to support regime change for the Islamic Republic of Iran and to promote the transition to a democratic government to replace that regime." The bill did not pass out of...