As Michael’s typically learned and gracious response underscores, we’re in more agreement than disagreement. He was right before anyone else, and has been right all along, about the centrality of Iran to our national security challenge. And we’re in accord about the Bush Doctrine, particularly with respect to what it originally said — democratization was not a defining feature at the beginning.

We’ll never know, but I think it’s a worthy thought-experiment to wonder what might have been if, as Michael and I have advocated for years, we had made regime-change in Iran the unambiguous policy of the United States once it was known that the mullahs had orchestrated the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing. By that, I don’t mean necessarily launching a military attack, but rather taking every conceivable non-military measure (the ones Michael mentions as well as others—like exploiting Iran’s dependency on gas imports, as FDD’s Mark Dubowitz has long advocated). I don’t think it would have brought the regime down without our military intervention. But maybe it would have tipped an uprising of the type Michael has long (correctly) predicted into a revolution, and maybe it would have happened years ago, before the regime was on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power. For what it may be worth, I continue to think this is a mostly academic question because (a) our own interests make regime change the only sensible policy whether or not the Iranian people hate their regime enough to revolt on their own; and (b) we are now at the point where it will take some military intervention to stop the regime from acquiring nukes, whether or not that was always the case.

I still disagree with what I take to be Michael’s optimism about what we might expect from a post-Khomeinist Iran. There’s a reason the Shah was overthrown. Iran has tended to Shiite theocracy for centuries. The quarter-century or so of Pahlavi secular rule that ended in 1979 was the exception. Relatedly, I also part company with Michael’s narrowing of the problem to the guys with the turbans, and his suggestion that you can have Islamic fundamentalism that is not jihadist. Fundamentalist Islam includes at its core the mission to govern in accordance with sharia, which is the purpose of jihad—forcible or non-forcible. Keeping the guys with the turbans in the chanceries does not mean that Islam is confined to the spiritual realm and politics is kept secular. It simply means that other fundamentalists run the government while the religious authorities advise. The law is still sharia, and the fundamentalists in power must try to govern within the parameters of what the religious authorities say Islam requires. In the Khomeinist model, the religious authorities actually govern, but that’s a small difference as far as we’re concerned. We would not be better off if the ruler were, say, a non-cleric like bin Laden than we would if the ruler were a cleric like Khomeini or the Blind Sheikh.

With that understanding, Sistani most certainly is a jihadi. What he is not is a terrorist. If by “jihadi” Michael meant terrorist (i.e., if he was employing our common usage of “jihadi”), then I’d agree. But I think a lot our our problem with understanding what we’re up against is imprecision in using terms like jihadi, Wahhabi, Salafist, moderate, etc. (I plead guilty to contributing to this confusion on occasion. But I’m trying to do better and I think we all should.) Jihadism is much broader than just terrorism and includes every method–forcible or non-forcible–of imposing sharia. Terrorism is one method, but far from the only one. Thus, properly understood, I think you could say Sistani is not a terrorist but he is a jihadist. He could not be a fundamentalist without being one.

Sistani wants sharia to govern Iraq (as it does, thanks to the culture and the new constitution that Michael aptly mentions). Sistani objects to Iran’s terrorism against Iranian Muslims, and that’s a good thing. But he also presumes that those Iranian Muslims, left to their own devices, would govern Iran as a Shiite theocracy. As I’ve said, it would be a vast improvement for U.S. national security if you had a new government in Iran that was not terrorist and not bent on exporting its Islamist revolution. But I would still expect it to be fundamentalist and, at best, mildly hostile to the U.S. I don’t think the nightly “Allahu Akbar” chants Michael describes are entirely a clever mocking of the regime — although Michael’s quite right that that has a lot to do with it. I interpret the chants as an indication that the dissidents are religious and believe—as Sistani believes—that the regime’s abuse of Muslims (not its terrorism in general but its terrorism against Muslims) is a violation of Allah’s law.

I have more to say on Afghanistan, but I will save it for my column rather than further belaboring this post. Let me just close by again thanking Michael, Mark and Rich for their thoughtful consideration of the issues raised in last week’s column. As Michael says, nothing is better than honest criticism from serious people. That’s the only way we’ll ever get good policy, and the stakes for our nation couldn’t be higher.