LIKE MOM and apple pie, supporting democracy in Iran has universal appeal in U.S. politics. So it is predictable that the February 2006 surprise request by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for $75 million in supplemental funding to support the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people won ready bipartisan acclaim and the sort of unquestioningly adulatory U.S. media coverage that was all too rare for an administration mired in Iraq and increasingly on the defensive at home. The dramatic new initiative found favor with American pundits and policymakers because it offered something for everyone. It represented a low-cost, feel-good means of leveraging palpable dissatisfaction among Iran’s young population and intensifying pressure on the regime—all while bolstering the administration’s bona fides on its much-hyped "Freedom Agenda" and placating advocates of more aggressive action toward Tehran.

Rice’s democracy initiative signaled a subtle but important transformation in America’s approach—one that had long relied on isolation as the primary tool for containing the Islamic Republic. For the Bush Administration, the challenges posed by Iran were too urgent and its political trajectory too unpredictable to wait out its current leadership; moreover, even a more robust form of isolation failed to satisfy the administration’s ideological predilections for idealistic interventionism. And so even as Washington reluctantly proffered tactical engagement with Tehran on Iraq and the nuclear question, the underlying rationale for American policy shifted in favor of direct U.S. efforts to influence the nature of the regime and the structure of power in Iran. This has not entailed a full-fledged American embrace of regime change—which Rice has disavowed pointedly even as reports of U.S. covert programs have surfaced in the media—but an amateurish array of programs and tactics intended to splinter Iran’s political elite and strengthen its opponents. From the Iranian perspective, this may be a distinction without a difference.