Crooks & Liars has already singled out Robert Kagan's odious revolutionary daydream for a sound whipping, but it's worth considering his scrawls alongside the flop Richard Haass has penned in Newsweek on the same subject, to which Kagan refers.  Both men have an odd understanding of realist thought and the methodology by which realists choose a course of action, as epitomized in the quote Kagan cherry-picks from Haass' article: "even a realist should recognize that it's an opportunity not to be missed."  By "it," they mean a revolutionary change of government in Iran—and they want it now.  The phrase "even a realist" is confusing—and mildly insulting to realists—because the whole point of realism is to thoroughly analyze a situation and the possible consequences, and then make the best possible decision according to a strict cost-benefit analysis.  The idea is that policymakers never make the wrong decision from the viewpoint of self-interest, even if it is "wrong" from an ethical perspective.  I would have expected Haass to say "especially a realist," instead; certainly so, considering he indicates at the beginning of the article that he is a "card-carrying realist" himself.  Why then would he phrase it contrarily?  (On this subject, why is the President of The Council on Foreign Relations a self-described realist?  I didn't think anyone other than snarky college kids with an oversimplified understanding of world affairs and zero life experience still held that worldview past the second half of their Introduction to International Relations class.)  The full introduction to Haass' article provides an ample window into his personal methodology and philosophy, and makes it clear how both of these thinkers arrived at the errant conclusion that an immediate regime change would be healthy for Iran, its neighbors, and even the whole world.

  Haass starts by setting up his readers with a bit of background:

Two schools of thought have traditionally competed to determine how America should approach the world. Realists believe we should care most about what states do beyond their borders—that influencing their foreign policy ought to be Washington's priority. Neoconservatives often contend the opposite: they argue that what matters most is the nature of other countries, what happens inside their borders. The neocons believe this both for moral reasons and because democracies (at least mature ones) treat their neighbors better than do authoritarian regimes. 

He then follows with a few examples in which America must cooperate with autocratic regimes for the Greater Good.  It's simplistic, yeah, but it's Newsweek.  Gotta keep it snappy for the readership—they don't got too much attention span these days.  Unfortunately Haass skipped over the whole part about how realist thought wasn't codified into American foreign policy until after World War II under the containment doctrine, and neoconservativism didn't even exist until the 1980's.  But these are apparently the only two schools of thought that Haass recognizes the existence of.  "Tradition" clearly only goes back sixty years.  So until the mid 20th century, the way America approached the world was determined by...hamsters?  Their little paws dipped in indelible ink,  their forelobes injected with LSD and their convulsing forms left to writhe on a sheet of butcher paper until they saw gods, the resulting Jackson Pollock mockup then transliterated by Delphi oracles stabbing obsolete French-German dictionaries with Victorinoxes?  We at least would have deftly avoided the whole world-killing ego-trip of the past 200 years as we instead collectively buried all our clothes and guns and danced naked among the trees that grew from them.

 Unfortunately, no.  The big driving force behind American foreign policy until realism became the vogue was liberalism, realism's archrival of old.  Lockean classical liberalism, the ideology of middle-class imperial Britain, and thereby that of middle-class imperial America.  Classical liberalism, the belief that every man (no icky girls allowed!) deserved freedom from his government's meddling—and therefore freedom from every other government's interference, too—also known as "the other way to justify being an asshole to every country smaller than you in your immediate vicinity and also some on the other side of the world."  Classical liberalism, which these days needs the "classical" prefix lest it become a swear word, and which is incarnated today in "neoliberalism," "neo" being ancient Greek for "not."  There were even those heady days of the Fourteen Points and the New Deal and the Great Society, when we indulged in contemporary liberalism and a bit of Keynesianism—but We Don't Talk About That.  Haass' bit about neocons spreading democracy because "mature" (read: liberal [read: Anglo-American]) democracies are supernice to each other and team up to take lunch money from wimpy African dictatorships?  That's a line lifted straight from that salty liberal dog Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace, because neoconservativism is a synthesis of liberalism and realism (the neo-not prefix strikes again).  It's considered an Iron Law that mature democracies do not aggress one another, even though it is rather wobbly for being wrought from iron.

 All of this revisionism is awfully suspicious, axing any mention of classical liberalism; I am beginning to see why Kagan is such a fan of this article.  But Haass' justification for his Realist Club membership card is what truly gives him away—he is a realist "on the grounds that ousting regimes and replacing them with something better is easier said than done."  He is a realist on the grounds that it is easier than being a neocon.  If he could, he would.  But his quaint sense of "let's be realistic here, guys" staves him off, no matter how deeply he aches to feel the cold, spine-shriveling embrace of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.  As a realist, Haass isn't opposed to neoconservativism; he just can't bring himself to drink the Kool-Aid yet.  Good thing for him that he's quaffed gallons of the stuff by the time he's done writing this article—hell, he even slaps on a title more swollen with reactionary absolutes than Kagan's.  Actually, Kagan's title is quite innocuous, quite suave.  Somebody has to play Jim Jones, after all.

 I fear that the analysts and pundits that advocate for an aggressive "solution" to Iran's nuclear ambitions (and let's be honest, the nuclear ambitions are all that they and most of us Americans care about; we don't really give a damn about women in chadors on Tehran streets halfway around the world.  These are but pathways to the final justification, little morsels of moral righteousness to lure us into complicityy) are devious, cunning people who have chosen not to include in their rhetoric some particular truths about historical and contemporary Iran because they do not fit into their worldviews.  This feeds my chief fear of the public assenting to an uncompromisingly hostile attitude towards Iran because they do not have access to Iran's reality.  They know instead an Iran which has been reconstructed to serve the interests of a few.  This manipulation of public opinion—and indeed of the public's knowledge—is what landed us in Iraq and what is keeping us in Afghanistan.  It is just what politicians and media bobbleheads do; they have a goal, they need the majority to go along with it, and so they make a sales pitch.  It is at least an indication of a generally working democracy when policymakers still vie to get the public on their side.  Problems arise when one side of the debate is shut out.  Favoring health care reform—especially true, sweeping reform—makes you a socialist to a vocal and actively obstructionist chunk of the public.  There is no debate to them, and when public discourse halts, our democratic process also halts—or worse, limps on as a caricature of itself.  Democracy is a system of compromise; nobody is ever supposed to get their way.  Polarization kills compromise; Israel is a prime example.  Absolute statements—like "regime change is the only way to stop Iran"—polarize public opinion, especially when they are published in a popular magazine by an influential intellectual.  They create an environment where expressing the contrary belief—no, regime change is not the correct response—makes you "soft," someone willing to sell out your country to foreign interests, like the Supreme Court just did with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.  So it has been made taboo to talk about the Near and Middle East as if they are populated human beings with their own opinions about things and not, in fact, a vague mix of enemy combatants and potential enemy combatants.  People misjudge situations and condone ultimately unwise courses of action when they fail to see things from other points of view.  In the case of Iran, hatred has become a given, a static value that can only be circumvented by violent revolution and a civil war riddled with interventionist meddling—or, to use the accepted euphemism, regime change.  This is a false notion, strengthened by rhetorical bewailings of our hated status; we fatalistically wonder Why do they hate us? and never the more pointed What did we do to create this situation?

 Historically, it—like so many other resonant hatreds—is the fault of British imperialism.  Before the Great Game in which Britain and Russia jockeyed for power throughout Europe and Central Asia (admittedly a rather one-sided affair, with the British ballyhooing grandiosely about the international Anglo-Russian fencing match and the Russians taking no real interest in the supposed clash of the world's two greatest empires, busying themselves instead with the actual pursuit of world domination and subjugation of lesser peoples), European powers pandered to the fearsome Ottoman Empire, which had browbeaten the Safavids of Persia into submission.  During the Great Game, both the crumbling Ottomans and the anemic Persians were traded as playing pieces between the two powers.  Iran suffered an even more ignominious puppetry with its occupation at the hands of a combined Anglo-Soviet force for reasons of paranoid wartime security (but they were fighting the Nazis, and saving the world from national socialism justifies everything.  Like Dresden).  The Iranians have a long and ignoble history with the British, and the American assumption of the Middle East from the British as one of its spheres of influence in the wake of World War II (all outta money chaps, wot wot) made for a seamless transition of Iranian resentment from the British to the Americans.  (America has often found itself on the wrong side of such a transition, it seems.  It has been caught up—with disasterous results—in the transition of the Phillipines out of Spanish control and Vietnam out of French control.  We chronically underestimate the ease with which an oppressed but hardly helpless and fiercely motivated people can transfer their resentment between oppressors.  We all look the same from underneath the boot.)

 As history sometimes demands, we must now skip back a bit and then forward again in order to discuss the Pahlavis (but briefly).  The Pahlavis are a dynasty a father and a son long, both helped into power by British assistance, the son backed by the US as a bulwark  against communism while Iran formed a cornerstone of the Northern Tier.  They were both autocrats, despite the extension of suffrage to women under the younger Pahlavi's ill-fated White Revolution—often cited understandably in contrast to the state of women in Iran today.  What must be understood about the Pahlavi Shahs is that to the Iranian people they are part and parcel to a legacy of foreign interference.  As the freshest memory in the collective Iranian mind of this legacy, their image is the one that comes to mind when clumsy American commentators bandy about the phrase "regime change," and the Iranians will take their oppressive theocracy over the monarchy's return any day.  This is the calculus that occurs, regardless of what Americans mean to replace the Ayatollah with when they talk about toppling him.  Luckily there is not too much cognitive dissonance to wrestle with there since I'm sure the neoconservatives who talk openly about staging a coup in Iran mean exactly that and would be plenty happy to see a dependent and obedient Shah in power.  Granted, even they could see the folly of such a brazen affront to the Iranian people, and so they have locked onto the reformists present in the current theocracy as an aggrieved party to champion.  Except, how do you put reformists in power when you necessarily destroy via coup d'etat the government they want to reform?  Well they're still moderates so that counts for something, right?

 Even if it does, Kagan and Haass' biggest mistake is ignoring the trickiest problem, presumably because they'd rather ignore it and pretend a coup would work out just fine.  The biggest obstacle to the exercise of American power in the Middle East is that the legacy of Anglo-American domination in the region delegitimizes anything associated with it.  Anything the Great Satan touches becomes an American pawn.  Hence the Little Satan, Israel.  Hence, the Pahlavis.  Hence too the reformists if they were put in charge by force.  It requires more delicate action, just the barest touch of subtlety instead of this "bombombomb, bombomb Iran" nonsense.  American policy makers already know how to do this on a basic level, and do so readily with Israel; "Holocaust reparations" paid through Germany, and a subsidizing of expenses to the tune of $3 billion a year, so that they can free up money for settlements on Palestinian land.  The problem is that everybody already knows America has got Israel's back like two football players in a locker room, just like how everybody knows Israel has nuclear weapons (one of the world's worst-kept secrets).

 The middling road is the best route to take with Iran.  The cultivation of the moderate element across all the Middle East will be the single greatest boon to American relations in the area.  It can be done by avoiding the association of the moderate element with the American agenda—keeping their integrity and sway intact—and avoiding the sorts of one-dimensional favoritist policies that have heretofore polarized the region into pro- and anti-American elements (see Russian policy towards the Middle East, both Soviet and post-Soviet, for a quick How To).  Any advocation of further American military action or support of military action by allies in the Middle East immediately disqualifies itself as bombastic jingoism, sure to further the dissolution of the American position.

 The following is a sort of thoughtful addendum, written at once in a flurry and kept in its original form:

 Obama's critics like to hurl the phrase "post-American" at him like an invective, because he is willing to engage in discourse with potential enemies and prefers multilateral solutions to unilateral ones.  If he truly is post-American, putting the world's best interests before America's self-interest, then it may be the greatest thing he has to offer the American people in the age of our imperial decline.  As we stand poised to enter a tumultuous new era in which there will be no one at the reins, the best we can hope for is a slide into the comfortable mediocrity of the British.  Worse, we face the sudden and violent failure cascade of our Union, not unlike the fate of the Soviet Union.  We are supremely fortunate in two regards.  One, the bonds of our national identity are stronger than that which held together the Soviet bloc, based on shared history and culture and not merely ideology.  Two, the British had to survive the disintegration of their empire over the course of two World Wars before they could arrive where they are today (aging gracefully, sitting on the fat pension that is the Commonwealth), and we are substantially less at risk of going to direct war with our competitors.  Indeed, all Obama would have to do would be relinquish the Far East as a supposed sphere of influence, and North Korea would shift very quickly from China's neonatal nuclear pawn to a nuclear problem.  That is a daydream I could really dream about, instead of this cockamamie Iranian counter-revolution bullshit:

 Japan might be able to self-determine for the first time in sixty-five years.  Perhaps North Korea loses its last iota of Chinese support and collapses, and the Korean peninsula is reunited.  China moves towards democracy and the free-market by the soft power of proximity and interaction.  Or, more pessimistically, China seizes the opportunity to acquire, directly or through proxy, Taiwan and Korea.  Japan screams bloody murder at being abandoned.  Then, if we wanted to be particularly Machiavellian, we fold our hands and smile as China severely overextends itself, then unwaveringly support guerilla wars in Korea, Taiwan, Tibet, a new Communist revolution in the rural heartland, and laugh as whole portions of the country shear off into independent states.  Sure, we get a whole slew of rogue states and another Mao Zedong, but nobody ever said it wouldn't be messy.  Same thing with the Middle East; we stop treating Israel like they're King of the Desert and they'll stop acting like it.  We recultivate Turkey as an ally and stop acting like Iran is going to nuke the whole Eastern Mediterranean tomorrow slash is on the precipice of civil war, whichever suits our rhetoric at the time.  We shut up about Iran's human rights abuses, we shut up about their election fraud, and pretend we are their only friends in the whole world until we get their enriched uranium away from them.  We give them nuclear power and do all the required enriching for them so they have no excuse to maintain their own facilities.  Then with these two highly influential Arab powers in the Middle East on our side, we can get around to sorting out the Palestinian issue.  Alternatively, we play Iran and Turkey against each other until they annihilate each other in a gigantic conventional land war in and around Kurdistan and Iraq (luckily Iran already has a penchant for this), and only then can we again play kingmaker and crown Israel.  This is what the British would do; it's something they did repeatedly in their long tenure as a colonial superpower—beat a temporary retreat, let the air clear, and perch like a vulture on the sidelines to wait for exactly the right moment to reassert themselves.   They did a lot of stupid shit too, and it's about time we started learning from their mistakes as well.  Don't forget to ruthlessly pit your enemies against each other in the meantime, and absolutely eliminate the stronger of the two when you strike.  The British couldn't outpace inevitable imperial entropy, but they left quite a legacy.  As their veritable offspring, you would think we'd learn a thing or two instead of acting the awkward stepchild who's no good at anything but falling down the stairs.  Unfortunately, all the other heirs to the family died and so we inherited their global reign.  We've done pretty well for ourselves, running a two hundred year old dynasty into the ground in just sixty years.  Whether responsible stewards of the world or slick 'n' slimy princes, we must learn when to loosen our grip on the reins and—especially in this case—it's better late than never.