Taking Aim at Iran

Chief Warrant Officer Ernest Jackson looks out from the bridge of the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz during a patrol this summer in the Persian Gulf, where the United States maintains a large Navy and Marine presence.

Push for action. Finding a different road—a more assertive one—is the thrust of numerous conservative commentaries and conferences. The get-tough advocacy, however, ranges widely in its prescriptions: harsher sanctions done with like-minded allies, embargoes, blockades, covert action, and airstrikes. Some favor targeting terrorist training camps and munitions plants in Iran, others the nuclear sites—or both.

Some of the advocacy takes heart from administration moves to ratchet up pressure. But, paradoxically, much of it emanates from those worried that the administration and its successor may not act. "I do fear that there will be reasons given to wait and not do anything," says Clifford May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Danielle Pletka, a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, talks of "losing hope" for a coherent policy that addresses the threat. "There's a growing concern," she says, "that as the Iranians step up, we're stepping back."

Much of the recent pressure for action is being driven by the Iranian connection to insurgent violence in Iraq. "The Iranians are at war with the United States in Iraq," says Kimberly Kagan, who is president of the Institute for the Study of War in Washington. And some say that a military response is overdue. "For too long, we have sent the message to Iran that they can kill Americans with impunity," says May. "I would favor eliminating those sanctuaries."

Last week, amid the commemorations of September 11 and Capitol Hill testimony on Iraq, others worked to turn the policy spotlight on Iran as well. The American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank infused with veterans of the Bush foreign policy team, held a book-launch forum for one of its own. Resident scholar Michael Ledeen, author of The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots' Quest for Destruction, summarized his thesis succinctly: "You can't make a deal with this regime.... They want us to die. They want to destroy us." Washington should support a popular revolution to unseat the mullahs and use limited strikes in "legitimate self-defense" against terrorist training camps and roadside-bomb factories in Iran, Ledeen said in an earlier interview. He opposes a general assault on nuclear infrastructure as too risky.

Elsewhere in Washington, the Iran Policy Committee, a group including former military officers and policymakers, rolled out its own book and set of speakers. The basic message: Countering Iran is the key to stabilizing Iraq and blunting Islamic extremism. "You've got to attack the enemy logistics bases" including in Iran, said one member of the group, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely. " Yet we fight this war [constrained by] borders—not too smart."

The week also saw the publication of neoconservative thinker Norman Podhoretz's book World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, which pegs the Islamic Republic as perhaps its most dangerous fount. In a Commentary article this June, Podhoretz cited Nazi Germany as the policy precedent applicable to Iran. "The plain and brutal truth is that if Iran is to be prevented from developing a nuclear arsenal, there is no alternative to the actual use of military force—any more than there was an alternative to force if Hitler was to be stopped in 1938," he wrote.

War games. The Heritage Foundation website features a page on Iran's "rising threat," and the influential think tank recently released a report on its war-game simulation of the impact on oil supply and prices if Iran choked off shipping at the Strait of Hormuz and prompted attacks on oil facilities in Iraq. The study concluded that the policy moves recommended by the team of former officials and analysts "eliminated virtually all of the negative outcomes from the blockade."