Rich: No, I don’t want to invade Iran, as I have said for many years. And I don’t follow your logic. I think — and, as recent news stories in the NY Sun and NY Times have made clear, the policymakers in the Bush administration now know–that much of the terror war in Iraq is the result of Iranian activities. I have written here for years that the Iranians were promoting both sides of a series of potential civil wars in Iraq, Sunni/Shiite, Kurd/Turkamen, Arab/non-Arab, etc.

The two policies you list (run away or invade Iran) are only two among many. In Tracinski’s article, he quotes Michael Rubin on behalf of what Tracinski calls “Cold War II.” That is, support democratic revolution in Iran. Again, I’ve been arguing in support of that since before we started Operation Iraqi Freedom. I think it’s the best option, I think it will succeed if it is well done, and I think this is an excellent moment for it, since Khamenei is dying (as I was the first to report; it is now all over the Iranian blogs) and there is an intense internal power struggle at work. You probably noticed that the justice minister was killed in an automobile crash the other day, and it is noteworthy that an amazingly high percentage of important Iranians die in car and air “accidents.”

I have also argued for a long time that our troops in Iraq should defend themselves against Iran and Syria. I think we should attack terrorist training camps in both those countries, and I think we should also go after the facilities where the terribly lethal new generation of IEDs is produced and assembled.

General Abizaid, and many in the Intelligence Community, have long resisted the plain fact that we are in a regional war. He has said he does not want to engage in a two-front war, but this is like saying you do not want to live in a world where the sun rises in the East and sets in the West; it does. And the war in Iraq is part of a larger war, and we need a strategy to win that war. I do not believe we can ever achieve decent security in Iraq so long as we limit our activities to Iraq alone, which is why I do not favor the “surge.” I think it’s both too little and too much, and I think it addresses the wrong problem.

Michael Rubin is entirely right to call for more aggressive broadcasting, support for Iranian trade unions, and the like. I think the first step must be an open presentation of the clear evidence of the Iranian/Syrian role in Iraq, followed by a declaration in favor of regime change in Iran and Syria, and then concrete political and material support (above all, communications equipment) for the regime’s many enemies, including workers, students, writers, senior Ayatollahs, and minority groups, including Kurds, Azeris, Ahwaz Arabs, Balouch, and so forth. Many argue that this strategy might work, but not fast enough. I don’t think anyone is smart enough to know in advance how long it might take to succeed, and I think we should remind ourselves that no one could possibly have anticipated, three months before it happened, the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Revolutions invariably surprise us. But successful revolutions almost always need an outside base of support. We should provide support for the Iranian people.

Sorry to be a bit long, but you asked…