From Our Archive: The American Right and Iran

As America approached the closing days of the Bush administration, one question has taken on ever greater prominence. What does America intend to do about Iran? In striking ways, Bush's Iranian policy has resembled the run-up to America's war with Iraq. Just as Saddam Hussein was described as preparing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), so have Iran's rulers. Just as Baathist Iraq was portrayed as supporting terrorism, so was the Islamic Republic of Iran. Once again neoconservatives are playing a leading part in the campaign against a Middle Eastern country's government, and the Bush administration has been portrayed as responsive to their concerns. Yet there are important differences between America's policy towards Iran and Iraq, and in examining these we can better understand not only the politics of the Bush administration, but also the current significance of neoconservatism within the Republican party and the American Right.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, first Afghanistan, then Iraq, were the objects of American retaliation. The first was sheltering al-Qaeda, while the second was accused of supporting terrorism and pursuing a programme of developing WMDs. Both formed central fronts in President Bush's War on Terror, and the attack on the latter was a measure of the rising influence of a grouping that had long sought to win American administrations to a greater use of American military power. For neoconservatives, the ending of the Cold War presented grave dangers to the surviving superpower. Instead of retreating from global responsibility, they argued, there needed to be an unflinching commitment to intervention against those who would threaten American hegemony. Where in many ways the threat was seen as coming from rogue states, new dangers were seen in the rise of a transnational terrorist network. Neoconservatives indeed argued that the two were often linked, and the answer was the deployment of American power. Yet this power would not only be unleashed in order to vanquish foes. It would be used too to drain the reservoirs in which enemies emerged and flourished. Despotisms, it was argued, either threatened America with terrorism or produced the discontent out of which terrorism emerged. One leading neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz, urged that Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt should all be overthrown. For neoconservatives in general, a crucial target was Iran.

The regime that emerged following the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 had long drawn the ire of many on the American Right. Neoconservatives have played a leading role in denouncing Iran as a regime that promulgated anti-Americanism, encouraged terrorism and oppressed its people. To this indictment a more pressing charge still has been added­­–that Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons. Enthusiastic supporters of Israel, neoconservatives have linked this effort to the Iranian president's denunciation of the Jewish state and support for Holocaust Revisionism. Neoconservatives emphasise that a nuclear Iran would be a danger to the United States, and in recent years they used an array of pressure groups against the Iranian regime, called for military strikes on its nuclear installations and urged support for dissidents within Iran and Iranian exiles elsewhere in order to bring the regime down.

Crucial in this have been the two leading neoconservative institutions that were so central in the drive to war with Iraq. In 2003, the American Enterprise Institute co-sponsored a conference on 'The Future of Iran: Mullahcracy, Democracy and the War on Terror'. With speakers from the Israeli Defense Ministry, the neoconservative Hudson Institute and the American Enterprise Institute itself, the gathering explored how America 'could promote democratization and regime change in Iran'. In 2005 another Institute gathering brought together different exile groups to discuss the Iranian leadership's treatment of minority ethnic groups while in 2007, it organised a meeting that asked if the administration's strategy towards Iran was adequate.

Should America 'be more vigorous in confronting the Islamic Republic or should we–as under secretary of state for political affairs R. Nicholas Burns has recently argued–continue to use diplomacy as the primary component of our Iran policy?' The speakers included Michael Ledeen, who, the announcement of the meeting declared, laid out in his new book, The Iranian Time Bomb, 'an effective strategy for thwarting' the Iranian rulers' 'global ambitions'. Ledeen had long been active on the issue. As early as 2001, he was lobbying 'friends in the Administration' for action against Iran. In 2002, in an article entitled 'Faster is Better, Mr President', he called on Bush to support the Iranian people through radio, television and 'regular, relentless statements from his top people damning the Iranian tyrants', while in 2007 he criticised the administration for failing to take up the case of trade union leaders who had been imprisoned by the Iranian administration.

If the American Enterprise Institute has been highly active on Iran, so too has the Weekly Standard. In early 2002, it published an article entitled 'On to Iran!' Authored by Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the article declared that the country's 'clerical regime' had been 'seriously seeking nuclear weapons since the end of the Gulf War in 1991'. It had been developing ballistic missiles, providing weapons to Palestinian and Lebanese radicals and was involved in terrorism. The only way to deal with the regime was to use force. The following year, the magazine's editor, William Kristol, declared that 'the liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East'. The next great battle would be 'for Iran'.

The accession to the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejed strengthened the magazine's stance yet further. In part, it affected the urgency with which the magazine saw the situation. Thus in 2007, one article commented on the Iranian foreign ministry's sponsorship of a conference of 'Holocaust deniers'. A leading Iranian cleric, it observed, had recently described 'The Jew' as 'the most obstinate enemy of the devout'. The Iranian president declared that with the destruction of '[t]he Zionist regime… humanity will be liberated', while the foreign minister, in opening the conference, said that questioning the Holocaust meant questioning 'the nature' of Israel. The greater radicalism of the new Iranian leadership radicalised the Weekly Standard's response. In his earlier editorial, Kristol declared that the battle for Iran would 'not, we hope' be 'a military battle'. In 2006, however, he called for consideration of a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. 'Yes, there could be repercussions–and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.' Just as in the period before 9/11, neoconservatives were uncertain whether the Bush administration would follow their admonitions. In another issue in 2006, the Weekly Standard proclaimed that the nuclear crisis with Iran was becoming 'the central crisis of the Bush presidency'. The Bush Doctrine involved pre-emption and regime change, but if the administration was seeking 'a military option . . . it is doing so very quietly'. Militarily, this could be fine, but politically Ahmadinejed had to be challenged. 'A war president who can be portrayed as having given up on the core of his own war strategy will be seen as a leader considerably less capable of deterring our terrorist enemies.'

If the American Enterprise Institute and the Weekly Standard represented the two leading forces in the neoconservative onslaught on Iran, they were only part of a complex constellation of organisations. In 2002, for instance, William Kristol testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his role as Chairman of the Project for the New American Century. President Bush, he declared, had broken with the realist approach of his father's administration and was seeking to promote the principle of liberty throughout the Middle East. There were two principal obstacles to this. One was Iraq. The other was Iran. Seeking a rapprochement with the Iranian regime was a mistake. Its nature was 'obvious . . . and implacable', and by overthrowing hostile regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, 'disaffected Iranians' could be encouraged to rise. The following year, Michael Ledeen was among the speakers at 'Time to Focus on Iran–The Mother of Modern Terrorism', a policy forum organised by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. The time for diplomacy, he announced, was past. It was 'time for a free Iran'.

Crucial in this fight has been the creation of organisations specifically focused on Iran. One­­–the Foundation for Democracy in Iran–was founded in 1995. Directed by Kenneth Timmerman, the Foundation was co-founded with two other veteran neoconservatives: Joshua Muravchik and Peter Rodman. In part, its activities built on Timmerman's time in the 1990s as the head of an investigative team for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on International Security, International Organizations and Human Rights. Just as he had done then, the Foundation attacked Iranian preparations for WMDs, but it also published news of events inside Iran and, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, reported that it sponsored 'a series of informal and formal meetings of democratic opposition leaders'.

The Coalition for Democracy in Iran was founded in 2002. It was formed by Ledeen and Morris Amitay, a former director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Other members included the American Enterprise Institute's Joshua Muravchik and Danielle Pletka, and Frank Gaffney and James Woolsey, the central figures in another key neoconservative group: the Center for Security Policy. The Coalition declared that it had been 'formed to mobilize the efforts of groups and individuals across the United States . . . who support the aspirations of the Iranian people for democracy'. In the wake of 9/11, it proclaimed, there was 'even greater urgency' to focus on the real agenda of the Iranian regime. The split between Iranian hardliners and moderates was mythical. The Islamic Republic supported terrorism and was developing WMDs. In 2004, it declared that it was clear that 'Iran's mullahs will not tolerate an emerging democracy on their border...If we are to succeed in Iraq, Iran must be reined in.' It called upon the Bush administration to react to 'this clear and present danger to US interests by using all the means at its disposal to deter Iran's activities in Iraq and its development of nuclear weapons'.

The Coalition ceased to exist in 2005. Yet another organisation emerged the same year. Describing itself as comprised of 'former officials from the White House, State Department, intelligence agencies, and experts from think tanks and universities', the Iran Policy Committee declared it represented 'a third alternative: Keep open diplomatic and military options, while providing a central role for the Iranian opposition to facilitate regime change'. Testifying in 2005 to the House's Iran Human Rights and Democracy Caucus, the Committee's founder and co-chair, Raymond Tanter, warned that if Iran acquired a nuclear bomb 'before the people are able to change the regime', it could threaten American interests in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Jordan.

More recently, yet more groupings has emerged. One­­–the Iran Freedom Initiative–was launched by the neoconservative American Foreign Policy Council in 2006. In his book Iran's Challenge to the United States, the Initiative's director argued that with the 'proper political will', Tehran's nuclear ambitions could be contained and the country freed from theocracy. A more strident group–the Iran Freedom Foundation–was headed by Jerome Corsi, who played a key role in the 2004 presidential election as author of a book accusing John Kerry of misrepresenting his record in the Vietnam War. The Foundation declared that America was vulnerable to an 'atomic 9-11', in which the Iranian regime could ship a nuclear device to an American port for detonation in a major city. Its use could reduce great areas to rubble and kill millions. 'In the blink of an eye, the United States could be reduced to second-class economic status.'

Yet if the political stage has had no shortage of organisations set up specifically to challenge the Iranian regime, these have been just part of a far broader range of groupings. As our discussion should already have alerted us, neoconservatism includes a multitude of multi-issue groups, many of whom are linked by cross-membership of leading figures. As we will see, on occasion they are also characterised by alliances with other political forces. Founded in 1985, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, for instance, was initially most associated with former AIPAC research director Martin Indyk, subsequently an advisor to Bill Clinton, but its Board of Advisors includes leading neoconservatives Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and James Woolsey, and in late 2007 it provided the platform for Vice-President Cheney's warning that 'serious consequences' would follow if Iran continued with its nuclear programme. The Committee on the Present Danger was launched in 2004, three decades after the Cold War group of the same name. Described as 'dedicated to protecting and expanding democracy by supporting policies aimed at winning the global war against terrorism', the Committee accused Iran of seeking to subvert the Afghan government and of having 'enough fissile material to field a nuclear weapon' by 2008. The organisation includes among its members the Iran Policy Committee's Raymond Tanter and the Foundation for Democracy in Iran's Kenneth Timmerman, while James Woolsey is its co-chair. Yet the organisation reaches beyond neoconservative luminaries. Its other co-chair is former Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz, and it includes as prominent members Senator Joseph Lieberman, former Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar and former Czech president Vaclav Havel.

Another neoconservative organisation has achieved similar success in reaching beyond the usual suspects. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies co-sponsored the 2003 conference on Democracy and 'Mullahocracy', and in 2007 organised a conference on 'Confronting the Iranian Threat: The Way Forward', which included sessions on 'Prospects for Reform or Revolution' and 'Policy Options'. Where the former session discussed whether regime change was a realistic possibility and whether Iranian dissidents could find a consensus, the latter looked at the quality of intelligence, the availability of 'covert action capabilities' and the potential of diplomatic pressure and military force. The speakers included the Under-Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, the former Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the Department of State and the former Deputy Commander, United States European Command.

In September 2007 yet another organisation entered the debate. It produced a newspaper advertisement denouncing the Iranian leader as 'a terrorist' and prepared to organise a forum in which '20 experts' would set out the case for Iran as a direct threat to America. Freedom's Watch had been launched earlier in the year after a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition addressed by Vice-President Cheney. Its founders included former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and Mel Sembler, a friend of Cheney and member of the American Enterprise Institute board of directors. (Sembler credited the Institute as crucial to the new group's formation.) As president, it appointed Bradley Blakeman, the President George W. Bush's former deputy assistant in charge of scheduling and appointments. With such strong connections, the new organisation denied that it was operating on behalf of the White House.

In considering the emergence of this grouping, we are still partly within the world of neoconservative think-tanks. However, we have also entered another domain. If, as we have seen, there has been neoconservative discontent with the Bush administration's apparent unwillingness to confront the Iranian regime, there has been one component with which they have enjoyed close relations. While the State Department has appeared willing to engage with Iran rather than confront it, the Vice-President's office has been particularly committed to a military settling of accounts with Iran, and until his recent resignation, his key advisor on Iran, David Wurmser, has been a fervent advocate of regime change. (Indeed, in 1999, the American Enterprise Institute published his book on the need to overthrow the Iraqi regime, in which he had suggested that this regime change would give 'the United States an opportunity to endanger and ultimately triumph over Iran's Islamic revolution as well'.)

As Cheney's advocacy of intervention should remind us, support for intervention in Iran stretches beyond neoconservatism. There are other groupings that can be described as 'hawks', and one of the most important examples of these is to be found among conservative evangelicals. The Christian Right involvement in the issue has taken several forms. The keynote speaker at the 2003 American Enterprise Institute event on Iran was Senator Sam Brownback, a key figure on the Christian Right. In 2007 the even more central James Dobson described during one of his regular radio broadcasts being invited along with '12 or 13 other leaders of the pro-family movement' to meet President Bush at the White House. The topic of the meeting, he revealed, had been Iran, Iraq and international terrorism, and he found it both enlightening and disturbing. The President had shown himself as determined. 'I wish the American people could have sat in on the meeting we had.'

Two years earlier, a former staffer at the prominent conservative think-tank, the Heritage Foundation, addressed the organisation on 'Russia, Iran and the Bomb: What Should the Bush Administration Do?' The speaker, Joel C. Rosenberg, had been a senior adviser to the leading Republican Steve Forbes, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky. His speech was the first in his tour promoting his novel, The Ezekiel Option, and if we turn to that book, we find an approach that we would not associate with the Heritage Foundation or Israel. The novel portrayed an invasion of Israel by Iran, Russia and other powers that Rosenberg claimed had been prophesied in the Bible by the prophet Ezekiel. The book culminates with a divine intervention in which a rain of fire destroys the enemy's forces, and subsequently Rosenberg described encountering Dobson after the evangelical leader's meeting with administration officials to discuss Iran and Iraq. Dobson had told him that he was becoming more 'concerned about the Iranian nuclear threat, and has been studying Ezekiel's prophecies'.

The influence of such a reading of the Ezekiel prophecies stretches into other sections of the Christian Right. In early 2007, National Liberty Journal, the successor to the seminal Christian Right publication, the Moral Majority Report, asked 'Is War With Iran Inevitable?', and cited the prophecies of Ezekiel as foretelling 'an invasion of Israel by a multitude of nations, including Iran, ending with the supernatural annihilation of Israel's enemies through God's direct intervention'. In his book, Jerusalem Countdown, another prominent preacher, John Hagee, argued that if Israel attacked Iran's nuclear sites, it could 'launch Ezekiel's war'. For many years, Hagee has taken a leading role in mobilising evangelicals in support of Israel. Christian Zionism argues that believers have a special responsibility to defend the Jewish state (this is often argued in terms of Biblical prophecy), and in early 2006 Hagee established Christians United for Israel. Later that year the organisation brought 3,500 evangelicals to Washington to lobby Congress, and they were addressed by the Israeli ambassador, Senator Rick Santorum and Republican National Party Chairman Ken Mehlman. It was time, Santorum declared, 'for the United States to stand with Israel and to go to the heart of the problem, which is Iran'. Representatives of the group had already held meetings with White House officials, urging the adoption of a more confrontational stance towards Iran.

Commanding the support of a large section of the Republican electorate, Christian Zionists and the Christian Right are forces to be reckoned with, but while their claims about Biblical prophecy are crucial to mobilising conservative evangelicals, their fears of Iran's nuclear ambitions are also shaped by an apocalyptic reading of Shi'ite theology. In August 2006, Rosenberg reported, he addressed 'about 75 Congressional and Bush administration staffers'. His speech was not about Christian understanding of the 'Last Days'. Instead he spoke on 'The Iranian President's End Times Theology and Its Implications for US Foreign Policy'. Ahmadinejad, he declared, believed that the end of the world was approaching and that an Islamic Messiah would launch a global jihad to annihilate Israel and the United States. Rosenberg 'encouraged these staffers to help the leaders they serve' understand radical Shiite theology. 'Only then will they fully appreciate how dangerous is the current crisis and how little time the US has to make the decision of how to stop Iran from launching its genocidal plans.'

Iran is in the sights of a variety of forces on the American Right, and they have looked to the Bush administration to move against it. In June 2007, the key neoconservative publication, Commentary, published Norman Podhoretz's 'The Case for Bombing Iran'. Some, he noted, believed that if sanctions were strengthened, then an uprising would come about. He had once believed this himself, but after years of waiting for an insurrection that never happened, he no longer believed. The 'brutal truth' was that the only way of stopping Iran from developing a nuclear arsenal was military force. A land invasion was out of the question, and only a campaign of bombing would work. While it would not destroy all Iran's underground facilities, it would set back its nuclear programme for years and 'might even lead to the overthrow of the mullahs'.

Podhoretz has played a part in the campaign for the Republican nomination for president, advising Rudy Giuliani who, he believed, was likely to carry out such a policy should he be elected. Podhoretz has described urging George W. Bush to take action against Iranian nuclear facilities, and his conviction that the President would not leave office with Iran having attained the capacity for nuclear weapons. Another prominent neoconservative, Joshua Muravchik, has urged an air strike, declaring: 'The Bush administration have said they would not allow Iran nuclear weapons. This is either bullshit or they mean it as a clear code: we will do it if we have to. I would rather believe it is not hot air.' In a 2006 article in Foreign Policy, Muravchik declared that: 'President Bush will need to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities before leaving office.' In an article in the Weekly Standard the same year, Reuel Marc Gerecht described 'To Bomb, or Not to Bomb' as 'the Iran Question'. Some of the arguments against such an action, he declared, appeared compelling, but they were not. Military strikes would not destroy the Iranian opposition. It might increase anti-Americanism, but an attack on the country's nuclear facilities would produce 'burning criticisms of the ruling mullahs'. Sunnis would not resort to terrorism in support of a Shi'ite regime, and if Iraqi democracy was successful, Iraqi Shi'ites would not mobilise in support of Iran. America should bomb Iran's nuclear installations, he declared, and if the regime sought to rebuild them, should attack a second time.

We should not assume that neoconservatives speak with one voice on how to confront Iran. Podhoretz's article refers to his coming to reject the belief that the Iranian regime can be overthrown by an insurrection, and it is evident that advocates of force and advocates of subversion are both to be found in the neoconservative camp. In a 2007 press release, the American Enterprise Institute declared that while debate on 'Iran's growing nuclear threat' had been framed as choosing between diplomacy and military action, these were not the only options. The Iranian economy was almost completely dependent on trade and business dealings with the outside world, and without foreign investment in its oil production, financial support and generous credit, it would be isolated. In a subsequent article in the Wall Street Journal, Danielle Pletka and another Institute author discussed what they had been able to discover about Iran's 'vast web' of economic relationships. Multilateral sanctions could put pressure on the regime, and if it might not get the Iranian leadership to abandon developing a nuclear arsenal, it could 'enable the international community and Iran's own population the time to cobble together a more effective strategy to end the program or force the mullahs from power'.

Neoconservatives have not only differed over what action to take against Iran. The Iran Policy Committee is a particularly enthusiastic supporter of a controversial Iranian organisation, Mujahadeen-e Khalq, and advocated its removal from the State Department's 'Foreign Terrorist Organizations List'. It was, Raymond Tanter declared, the only group the Iranian regime feared. It provided information on the Iranian nuclear programme and was 'also a possible ally of the West in bringing about regime change in Tehran'. In contrast, other neo-conservatives have been far more critical. Indeed, an article on the American Enterprise Institute website describes it as one of a number of 'Monsters of the Left'. In its early years, it 'preached a combination of Marxism and Islamism'. It bombed the United States Information Office and assassinated the deputy chief of the American military mission. After the 1979 Revolution it launched a terrorist campaign against the Khomeini regime and eventually sought exile in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Now it enjoyed backing from some members of Congress and claimed to support democracy. Yet it still stood for dictatorship.

There are arguments over other aspects of the Iranian opposition. The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has been reported as effectively auditioning Iranian dissidents, searching for someone who can play the role that Ahmad Chalabi played in Iraq opposition circles. While none has emerged, among those to have been considered is Reza Pahlavi, the son of the Shah. However, not only does the republican or monarchical nature of the future Iran remain unclear, whether it would remain a unitary state is also uncertain. The American Enterprise Institute's 2005 gathering did not merely involve the bringing together of Iranian exiles. The title of the event referred to federalism, and speakers included representatives of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan and the Azerbaijani Societies of North America. Addressing the attendees, Michael Ledeen noted that only a narrow majority of Iranians were Persian, but he added that critics were wrong to assume that the American Enterprise Institute favoured the break-up of the Iranian state.

If neoconservatives are divided as to how to strike a blow against the Iranian regime, a number of other sections of the American Right have not been persuaded that it should be done at all. Pat Buchanan's magazine, the American Conservative, has been particularly forceful in this regard, and has presented a forum for groupings that do not share Buchanan's protectionist nationalism. Buchanan has argued that 'like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, bombing Iran could unite Iranians behind their rulers'. Where Bush feared a failed presidency, neoconservatives wanted 'a new war to make Americans forget the disaster that they wrought in Iraq'. Yet Iran had 'no missiles that can reach us, no atom bombs', and if Nixon could talk to Chinese Communists, then America could hold talks with Iran's rulers. His magazine also published an article by Charles V. Pena, a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, arguing that air attacks would have to be on much more than the 14 nuclear facilities. Other sites concerned with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the air defences would have to be weakened before 'the primary targets could be hit'. Missiles could be launched at American troops in Iraq and at Israel; destabilising violence could be unleashed in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and elsewhere; and 'precarious Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan' could succumb.

Another article appeared from Leon Hadar of the libertarian Cato Institute, who argued that clear evidence was lacking that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, and made extended comparisons between the neoconservative promotion of regime change in Iraq and their endeavours against Iran. Nationalists, realists and libertarians could all be found in the pages of Buchanan's magazine, and in early 2007 a letter to members of Congress called for diplomacy and hearings into the Bush administration's plans to attack Iran, signed both by left-wingers and such figures as Phil Giraldi of the American Conservative, Ivan Eland of the libertarian Independent Institute and Michael Ostrolenk of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy.

Where intervention in Iraq had been opposed by nationalists, realists and libertarians, this had not stopped it. Yet with Iran, there is not only disagreement on the right, but neoconservatives have been uncertain how to proceed. In contrast to 2003, their influence within the administration has waned, with such figures as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle no longer in strategic positions. The administration itself is been traversed by fierce disagreements. In late 2006, the nomination of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense met with outrage from neoconservatives. 'What's happening here,' Frank Gaffney declared, 'is essentially the end of the administration as we've known it.' Kenneth Timmerman remarked, 'Pretty clearly, it signals a return to the ''Bush 41'' policy.' George W. Bush had said that he 'was changing the old way of things and was now going to put freedom at the center of American foreign policy…. With the old guard coming back, they would put stability and accommodation at the centre of foreign policy, and not freedom.'

In early 2007, news reports appeared of conflict between Condoleeza Rice and Dick Cheney. Where the Secretary of State favoured diplomacy, Cheney's staff were criticising Rice's strategy in think-tank gatherings, and David Wurmser reportedly declared that Rice's strategy was failing and that the president would have to reach a decision on military action. The appearance in late 2007 of a National Intelligence Estimate suggesting that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme four years earlier met with strong opposition from neoconservatives. The men primarily responsible for the document had clashed regularly with hard-line conservatives earlier in the decade, it was argued, and where Danielle Pletka declared that the document's authors had 'a clear intention to deceive and to redirect foreign policy', Norman Podhoretz described the Estimate as 'more of a political document' than an intelligence one. In early 2008, he published 'Stopping Iran: Why the Case for Military Action Still Stands'. Where in his earlier article, he noted, he had thought that the obstacles to bombing Iran's nuclear facilities were great, now, largely as a result of the NIE, they were far more formidable. Yet if Bush did not attack, his successor should.

Before 9/11, neoconservatives had not been a crucial factor in the formulation of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Now, as Bush comes towards the end of his presidency, it is once again facing challenges to its bid for hegemony not only for America, but for itself. Yet while the Giuliani campaign for the presidency is no more, William Kristol, Gary Schmitt and other leading neoconservatives are among the advisors to John McCain, who has caused controversy when in a meeting with veterans in South Carolina in early 2007 he responded to a question about when 'an airmail message to Iran' would be sent by adopting the chorus of a Beach Boys song to 'Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran'. Yet as Bush's administration approaches its end, new moves were afoot to engage Iran not militarily, but diplomatically. In July 2008 the State Department announced that plans for Under Secretary William J. Burns to meet Iran's nuclear negotiator demonstrated that 'the United States is committed to diplomacy'. While Democratic Senator John Kerry described this as a 'welcome flip-flop', Bush's former Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, already critical of the removal of North Korea from America's list of state sponsors of terrorism, said that the news on Iran was 'further evidence of the administration's complete intellectual collapse'. Yet reports have also appeared of the administration's escalation of covert operations against Iran. The relationship between Bush's reliance on diplomacy and force remains unclear. How American finally deals with Iran will tell us much about not only how the Bush administration seeks to impact the Middle East, but the role that neoconservatives have come to play within a Republican presidency.

Originally published in The Political Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 4, October-December 2008.

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