...Change on Iran should have been the first clear policy corollary of regime change in Iraq. But there was either no point or no way to accommodate Tehran's large stakes in post-Saddam Iraq, U.S. policymakers concluded. Neither was it possible to prevent Iran's ruling Shiite clerics from influencing events and attitudes in the large Shiite population centers in Baghdad and southern Iraq.

Instead the administration left U.S. policy on Iran in a steadily deepening limbo: Once a member of the "axis of evil," Iran became the embarrassing, unaddressed missing link in the Bush administration's bold ambitions to transform Iraq and to becalm the world's most volatile and treacherous region. Iran slipped into the "too hard" file.

That is understandable, if unforgivable. No one has a sure-fire policy for dealing with the theocratic state founded on the ruins of the Persian empire. France, Germany and Britain have proved this in trying to talk the ayatollahs out of developing nuclear weapons. Despite clear and repeated Iranian lying to them, the Europeans persevere.

"In the end, we may wind up only slowing them down -- hopefully significantly -- in what they intended to do all along," a European participant in this effort told me recently. "But given the lack of any other workable option, this is worth doing."

U.S.-Iranian discussions on cooperating (or at least on not crossing wires) in Iraq would have been difficult to arrange and carry out. It would not have been as simple as the indirect but useful dialogue American diplomats had with the Iranians on post-Taliban Afghanistan, where Iranian interests and opportunities are substantially less than in Iraq.

But any serious effort in that direction was smothered in its crib by familiar hardliner vs. softliner debates within the administration -- and the less-remarked-on but equally crucial absence of a clear U.S. diplomatic strategy for consolidating and converting American battlefield prowess into sustainable political gains abroad. It is difficult to fit Iran into a strategy if there is no strategy to begin with.

Instead, policy has consisted of occasional growls from senior Pentagon officials warning Iran (and its quasi-surrogate Syria) to halt infiltration into Iraq, followed quickly by public assurances from the State Department that the growls do not represent threats of military action. Even Freud could not explain the Rumsfeldian-Powellian Syndrome that afflicts Bush foreign policy...