Ayatollah Attitude: Iran's place in the new war.(Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; Iran must make choices concerning the support of terrorism)

The events of September 11 have dramatically reshaped the politics of the Middle East, and nowhere more so than in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran now faces a stark choice: It must abandon its sponsorship of terrorism or risk the possibility of U.S. punitive action.

Iran's initial condemnation of the terror attacks soon evolved into a settled defiance of U.S. calls for military action against the terrorist strongholds, quashing hopes in Washington for a tacit alliance with the Islamic Republic. As the Bush team searches the Middle East for allies, it will find an Iran that, despite its antiterrorist rhetoric, persists in supporting organizations that engage in violence for political purposes.

Domestically, Iran is making an important social transition. The cadre of reformist clerics around the president, Muhammad Khatami, appreciates that the autocratic regime, with its rigid definition of Islam, is eroding support for the very idea of an Islamic republic; these moderates are therefore willing to experiment with some degree of political and cultural liberalization. Hard-liners, however, continue to cling to dogmatism; they favor an Islam that is averse to innovation, intolerant of dissent, and contemptuous of democratic accountability. The hard-liners have found a patron and ally in the stern and forbidding figure of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader. Khamenei's power is considerable: Under Iranian law, he certifies elections and appoints the leaders of the judiciary, the armed forces, and the Revolutionary Guards. Hard-liners also control important parts of the foreign-policy machinery, and quickly used this power to quash Khatami's pragmatic efforts to use the current crisis to reach out to Washington.

To point out, however, that Iran's domestic scene is polarized should not lead us to underestimate the relative consensus among Tehran's competing political factions when it comes to key international issues. For an entire generation of Iran's clerics, relations with the U.S. have been mired in visceral emotion. From Tehran's perspective, the U.S. is more than another great power with which Iran must deal; it embodies a whole range of political and cultural grievances. America's culture of pluralism and materialism threatens the foundations of an Islamic republic; furthermore, its economic and geopolitical preeminence works to block Iranian ambitions to lead a coalition of Gulf and Caspian states. Successive Persian empires have dreamt of becoming the dominant power in Islamdom, only to be thwarted by other claimants to that status. Arab dynasties, Ottoman rulers, and British imperialists all denied Iran its historic mandate of shaping the region in its own image; the U.S. is just the latest obstacle to Iran's hegemonic ambitions.

In Afghanistan, however, Iran's objectives ostensibly coincide with those of the U.S. Iran shares a long, troubled border with Afghanistan and has funneled extensive support to the Taliban's opponents. While both Iran and the Taliban claim religious legitimacy, deep doctrinal differences and strategic insecurities have divided them from the start. Tehran has declared the Taliban a menace, its ideology a perversion of religious teachings, and its policies on women, art, and culture an affront to civilized norms. (This is Iran talking.) Three years ago, the hostility nearly escalated to war after Iranian diplomats were killed in the Taliban capture of a minority stronghold.

All this is true, but Iran's clerics take only limited comfort in America's destruction of their Afghan foes-because it implies a further projection of U.S. power. Khamenei has warned that "the American government intends to repeat what it did in the Persian Gulf in this region . . . They intend to come and establish themselves in this region under the pretext of a lack of security here." Hassan Rowhani, the secretary general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, reached a similar conclusion, declaring, "A long-time aim of the Americans has been to dominate the oil wells in the Persian Gulf and the Caspian ...