If you like Iraq, you'll love Iran

Despite that, the Iranians believe that we're determined to manipulate their politics?

And that we do so constantly. To this day, Iranians will kind of cozy up to you and say, "All right, tell me the truth: Why did the CIA put Khomeini in charge?" And of course, of all the things the CIA might have wanted to do, putting Khomeini in charge was not one of them.

When it comes to the current regime, what do we actually know about them? Do we even know who's in charge?

It's difficult to say. We have what we think is a decent picture of the bare bones of Iranian decision making. But in terms of when Iran decides to do something, who made the decision and why, it's often like reading tea leaves. Iran has a vibrant political culture, and though I'm purposefully steering away from the term "freedom of the press," there are a lot of different viewpoints heard. But although we have more of a window into Iran's political debate than into many other countries, it's very difficult to know where different players within the Iranian political system are lining up. Iran has 10,000 different key players, and on every issue, they line up differently. So it's very hard to know on any given issue who's siding with whom, who's making which arguments, who believes what.

You reveal that during the Clinton administration, our diplomats couldn't get a two-sentence message through Iranian security to Iran's reformist president, Khatani. Do we currently have the resources and connections inside Iran to boost democracy there?

I think that our ability to do so is exceedingly limited. But there aren't particularly compelling reasons not to try. It's important, but mostly for the sake of the United States being able to say, "We have a consistent position on democratization." I'm deeply dubious that pursuing regime change is going to solve our problems there. The historical pattern is that every time that the United States has tried to reach out and help a group within Iran, it has backfired on us. Typically, it's caused harm to the group we were trying to help.

I do think that regime change is coming to Iran and there's no doubt that the vast majority of the Iranian people want a different kind of Iran. But I suspect it's going to be a very long time. The Iranians have demonstrated that they're willing to use enormous amounts of force to hold on to power. They've stumbled on the China model of liberalizing the social and economic sphere while clamping down on the political sphere -- focusing the energies of their young generation on economics and hedonism, for lack of a better term.

There's another reason why I think regime change is not the answer for us: Our problems with Iran are ultimately very short term. Terrorism is an immediate problem. The nuclear issue is immediate too, not because Iran is about to get a weapon -- the estimates out there are three to 10 years -- but because right now there's a window to use diplomatic means to solve it. We have short-term problems that require short-term solutions. Regime change is at best a very long-term fix.

How has having 150,000 troops in the country next door affected our relationship with Iran?

Well, right after the fall of Baghdad, the Iranians were very concerned that we would make Iran next -- the famous "right turn at Tikrit" -- where the 3rd Armored was going to turn right and drive into Iran. They were nervous about that for quite some time.

But now, paradoxically, the Iranians see America's involvement in Iraq as a tremendous source of weakness, and they're really strutting their stuff. I believe one of the reasons they've been so brazen about their nuclear enrichment program is that they believe the United States is so completely bogged down in Iraq that we don't have the military capacity to come after them, even if we wanted to do so. You hear this regularly from Iranian officials.

But there are also other layers. A really big one is that Iraq has now become a common interest of those two countries, just like Afghanistan is a common interest. Neither Iran nor the United States wants to see chaos there, and both countries seem to believe that the best outcome for both of them, as well as for the Iraqis, is to have a stable, pluralistic system in Iraq that will allow the Shia majority to have political clout equivalent to their demographic clout.

The Iranians aren't under the illusion that the Iraqi Shia are going to be their puppets -- they remember the Iran-Iraq war, when Iraq's Shia fought them tooth and nail. But the Iranians are deeply afraid of chaos in Iraq spilling over into Iran and they recognize having a pluralist Iraq where the Shia are in the ascendancy is an Iraq they could live with. That would be such a nice change for them. As a result, we've seen a great deal of tacit cooperation between Iran and the United States over Iraq.

Now, obviously there are also Revolutionary Guards running around Iraq doing nasty things.

So some Iranian agents are blowing things up in Iraq, and others are trying to keep the peace?

Exactly. That's always the case with Iran, because Iran doesn't have a fully coherent government. There are multiple governments, and some of these elements freelance.

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