The United States is about to hand control of the Middle East over to Iran. On a silver platter.

This is one of the most stunning geopolitical developments since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The much-talked-about National Intelligence Estimate released Monday of last week was the latest and most dramatic of a series of signs revealing an utterly remarkable, years-long sea change in U.S. foreign policy. Even more, it pointed to what the neighborhood around Iran and Iraq is about to look like—and it isn’t pretty.

The nie was one step—a big step—in an awkward dance the U.S. and Iran have been sharing ever since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It is becoming clearer all the time that Iran is the dance leader.

How that intelligence estimate will increase Iran’s standing regionally and even globally became apparent immediately upon its release. The first sign was Iran’s increased nerviness—Ahmadinejad talking about his “victory” and the “fatal blow” to American military action; Iranian officials demanding the end of UN sanctions, a U.S. apology and damages; Iran’s oil minister calling the U.S. dollar “unreliable” and announcing no more oil trade in greenbacks. There were also the death knells memorializing international pressure against Iran’s nuclear program—Ahmadinejad pledging that Iran wouldn’t lose “one step” in its uranium enrichment; Russia saying discussion of more UN sanctions should end and promising to resume work on Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

And on and on. Yes, the Bush administration is still pressing for sanctions. But they won’t happen. It is truly a dead issue—not that they had any real effect anyway. Iran will continue its uranium enrichment activities (not to mention its missile program) unhindered.

The U.S. may not like it, but in truth it has accepted it. It has been slowly coming to terms with—and, in fact, slowly breaking to the public—the idea that it needs Iran, particularly for help in ending its engagement in Iraq. The nie—which deliberately played up the unsupportable notion that Iran poses no threat—actually came at a convenient time for Washington: Striking a deal with Iran doesn’t look nearly so repugnant if Iran isn’t a rogue nuclear nation.

Iran’s Arab neighbors see through the pretense. Unconvinced by the findings of the nie—and still vigilant to the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons—many of them recognize the political concerns that may have informed the estimate. As analyst Mohammed Kharroub wrote in the Jordanian daily Al-Rai, the nie “opens the door wide to numerous ‘compromises’ between Washington and Tehran” in those areas—Iraq and Israel among them—“that have exhausted Washington.” Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment Middle East Center in Beirut, said, “This report is a face-saving device for the U.S. It gives the U.S. administration a subtle way to backtrack on their stance regarding the Iranian nuclear issues” (Los Angeles Times, December 6).

These Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, are deeply concerned as they see the U.S. backing away from being a check on Iran, and Iran, in the words of the Times, feeling “emboldened to strengthen its military, increase its support for Islamic radicals and exert more influence in the region’s troubled countries” (ibid.).

Their concerns are justified. The Middle East is about to see a whole lot more of Iran.

Retracing Our Steps

How did this happen? Even during the Clinton administration, Iran was at the top of the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Today we are over six years into a supposedly out-and-out “war on terrorism.” When President Bush spoke of that war after 9/11, he said, “Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.” By that definition, Iran would qualify as the premier target. In his State of the Union address the following January, he specifically branded Iran as a member of an “axis of evil.”

Let’s briefly trace our steps from there to here to see how it is that Iran is now in a position practically to shape the Middle East as it will.

Even by the time “axis of evil” entered public discussion, the limits of America’s determination to follow through on its rhetoric had already started to appear. The first target in the “war on terrorism” was the shaky, friendless Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Washington had meanwhile worked to cobble together a worldwide coalition of anti-terrorist nations—and, remarkably, among the nations it invited to join was the world’s number-one state sponsor of terrorism: Iran.

Iran denied the request—and surely savored the opportunity.

In response to this sequence of events, the Trumpet wrote, “[T]here will soon come a point when the U.S. won’t even be a factor in this war. … [P]rophecy shows that it is, regrettably, underestimating its enemy. … As we now examine the facts emerging from this war, we can see unequivocally that the terrorist snake will survive America’s aggression—head intact, and stronger than ever. … Make no mistake about it: Iran is the head of the snake.” You can read the prophetic reasoning behind that forecast in our booklet The King of the South.

The likelihood of the Trumpet’s assessment playing out doubled a year and a half later, when the White House chose its second target in the war on terrorism: Iraq. Here is where the big revelation that emerged from the nie—that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003—has some fascinating ramifications.

That Iran did in fact have a clandestine nuclear weapons program in the decade and a half prior to 2003 comes as little shock, considering its naked aspirations to be the dominant power in the Middle East. But why halt the program in 2003? The nie credits “international pressure”—as if it was the threat of sanctions, or some stern words issued through diplomatic channels. Not likely. In fact, diplomatic efforts to stem Iran’s nuclear program didn’t officially start until 2004. What did happen in 2003 that may have convinced the Iranian mullahs to switch off the power at the nuclear weapons lab was America’s invasion of Iraq.

If you remember, about that time, Muammar Qadhafi decided it was in his best interest to bring hiswmd programs to a halt. Seeing the world’s mightiest military, backed by an international coalition, smash through Iraq and turn the mighty Saddam Hussein into a fugitive cave-dweller in three quick weeks apparently made quite an impression.

The irony is, at the same time Iran stopped its clandestine nuclear weapons program (assuming the nie version of events is true), it also held clandestine celebrations over the demise of its archenemy, Saddam. The U.S.-led strike in Iraq successfully removed the biggest obstacle within the region to Iran realizing its regional ambitions.

Nevertheless, the U.S. might have used its victory in Iraq to press its advantage with Iran; indications are it might have worked. But that is not what happened. In an effort to wage a fundamentally altruistic war—one that wouldn’t appear imperialistic and nasty to the rest of the world—the U.S. chose not merely to eliminate the threat of Iraq, but to undertake the impossible task of transforming Iraq into a functional, West-friendly democracy. Four and a half years and $2 trillion later, that task remains a work in progress.

Those 4½ years have been a slow, inevitable illumination of the fact that in failing to pursue Iran—the head of the terrorist snake—from the beginning, the U.S. made a fundamental error from which it could not recover.

Today, the idea of going after Iran has been superseded by a bitter reality: Not only does America not have the means and the political will to mount a successful attack on Iran, but Tehran has gained enough influence over the situation that the U.S. can’t even extricate itself from Iraq without Iran’s help.

Again, this turn of events ranks as one of the most stunning in post-Cold War geopolitics.

The High Cost to America

When the nie came out, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards drew a very odd conclusion: He said it “shows that George Bush and Dick Cheney’s rush to war with Iran is, in fact, a rush to war.”

Amazing what passes for a rush to war these days. The Bush administration hasn’t rushed to anything. What it has done is slowly, gingerly, reluctantly look for a way to come to terms with an Iranian presence in Iraq. Though it is clearly uncomfortable with the idea and is doing all it can to try to gain the upper hand, the signs of working toward an agreement have been there. In addition to numerous private talks between the U.S. and Iran, the two parties have conducted three rounds of public talks, and a fourth will occur later this month. Regarding Iran’s nuclear material, almost two years ago the U.S. agreed to allow Russia to enrich uranium for Iran on Russian soil (a proposal Israel rejected)—no small accommodation. Aside from occasional, mostly veiled verbal threats, the U.S. has remained solidly committed to addressing the Iran nuclear question through the clunky Security Council, which by nature of its composition is unable to agree upon any but the most anemic of punitive measures against Iran. The threat of a military strike on Iran has never been anything more than a negotiation tool.

Now with the nie, Washington has moved decisively toward a final agreement, effectively eliminating perhaps the largest obstacle creating public resistance in the West to permitting Iran a freer hand in Iraq and elsewhere: the perceived threat of an Iranian nuke. Evidence abounds that this political goal influenced the presentation of the intelligence that informed the nie.

Yesterday, Ahmadinejad called the nie a “step forward,” and said more such steps will lead to “an entirely different situation” in relations between the two countries. True enough.

It’s clearer all the time. The world has already seen the toughest U.S. policy toward Iran it is going to see. Don’t expect President Bush to get tougher during his final year in office; he has already revealed—even within one month of 9/11—the direction his administration will take with Iran. And you can be sure the next American president will lurch even further toward the appease-and-concede camp.

The U.S. is purchasing an exit from Iraq—and at an extraordinarily high cost. By emboldening Iran, it is selling out all those neighboring Arab states that grow uncomfortable when Tehran gets aggressive. Far more tragically, it is selling out its longtime ally Israel, which is far and away the number-one target of Iran’s hostility. (How ironic that all of this U.S.-Iran dealmaking has occurred in the immediate wake of the U.S. sponsoring the Annapolis “peace” conference—considering that Iran underwrites two of Israel’s biggest terrorist enemies: Hamas and Hezbollah.)

On top of all that, the U.S. purchases this exit at the expense of exposing its own crippling weakness of will—and granting Iran bragging rights for having tussled with the “Great Satan” and won.

If you thought Ahmadinejad was insufferable after the nie was published, just stick around.