Conundrum

Economist has an exceptional piece on Iran, weighing all options at our disposal to change the regime's "behavior". The Economist doubts that strong sanctions will have any discernible impact to change the political dynamic within Iran enough to change the Islamic Republic's behavior, in part, due to their high threshold of tolerating austere conditions(8 years of Iran-Iraq war). It also asserts that all options are equally bad, including overt military action, and will have the adverse effect of strengthening the regime rather than weakening it:

Nonetheless, it is not clear that sanctions are even close to imposing the sort of pain needed to alter the government's nuclear behaviour. They have pushed down living standards, but war and revolution have taught Iranians how to muddle through. An economy like Iran's, dominated by the government budget, is better able than most to take the travails of the private sector in its stride. And since energy exports make up almost half the government's revenues, high world prices (kept high in part by the tension over Iran) have compensated nicely for much of the damage sanctions have inflicted. Besides, many powerful Iranians prosper through their control of a relatively closed economy. The openness the world proffers as an “incentive” to give up the bomb strikes at some of this group's vested interests.

The fundamental problem here is that so far all notions of "sanctions" are based on western notions of what will hurt rather than trying to get into the mullah's minds and figure out what will actually move them.

The second problem with Iran is that we have not confronted an unbroken string of Iranian aggressions over 28 years: from killing the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to Khobar Towers, Buenos Aires, Beirut, Embassy take-over/hostages. What our inactions have resulted in is nothing more than a nightmarish convoluted mix of threats all over the ME. All the current threats facing the Middle East and the West - the Hamas takeover in the Gaza Strip, Hizballah’s bid for power in Lebanon, political turmoil in Iraq, and imminent nuclear weapons in the hands of a radical dictatorship share the Islamic Republic as their main financier and instigator.

The third and the most important and, often entirely overlooked, problem is the fact that we have not been able to identify a cohesive picture of who the enemy is and what it has been up to for the past 28 years? The vast, well-funded highly organized and strategically well-placed *lobby of the Islamic Republic (with the help of our socialist useful idiots)--starting well over 10 years ago--in Washington D.C. is mainly responsible for this confusion among our policy makers.

By nearly 30 years of retreat/surrender we have taught every rabid Islamists in Iran (though a minority but holding all the financial and military power) that we will do nothing in the face of aggression and it might be too complicated now to start. We need tink tanks to stop listening to biased lobbyist and do their own investigation and analysis.

*NIAC, CASMII, etc.