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These patrols were seeking out suspected "regime loyalists" from the Ba'athist era by knocking down doors, shooting whomever resisted, and arresting all men of "military age" in the household. As the resistance spread, its various factions became more aggressive and resourceful. Over the next year, it blossomed into a formidable and complex enemy that the US Army - to the surprise of American officials in Washington and Baghdad - did not have the resources to defeat. It was, then, the swiftly growing Iraqi resistance that, by preventing the consolidation of an American Iraq, forced an Iranian campaign off the table and back into the shadows where it has remained to this day.

The nuclear conundrum
The rise of the Iraqi resistance drastically changed the equation for the Iranian leadership. The threat of an imminent US assault had reduced the long- term Iranian nuclear option to near pointlessness, which was why the Iranian leadership was willing to negotiate it away in exchange for a guarantee of safety from attack. Once the prospect of a protracted guerrilla war in neighboring Iraq arose, however, the Iranian leadership suddenly found itself with an extended time horizon for tactical and strategic planning.

Becoming (or at least continually threatening to become) a nuclear power again became a promising path of deterrence against future American threats - at least if the North Korean experience was any guide. So the Iranians began pushing ahead with their nuclear program; and while no one could be sure whether their work was aimed at the development of peaceful nuclear energy (their claim) or nuclear weapons (as the Bush administration insisted), their moves made it conceivable that they might actually be capable of building a bomb in the many years that it would take - it now became clear - for the US to have any chance of pacifying Iraq.

The increasingly destructive, devolving American occupation in Iraq also deflected the anger of an Iranian population that had been growing restless under the harsh clerical hand of Iran's political leaders. At the time of the invasion, opinion surveys in Iran indicated both "widespread discontent within the Islamic republic" and a generally positive attitude toward the United States. ("The average Iranian does not bear ill will against America.")

American officials interpreted this to mean that "the clerics may have lost the upper hand" in Iran. However, this widespread discontent quickly dissipated under the pressure of regional events; and two years later, Iranians elected as president Mahmud Ahmadinejad, a fundamentalist militant and electoral underdog, who eliminated the US-favored "moderates" in the first round of voting and then, in a runoff round, soundly defeated a less radical representative of the Iranian establishment, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani. Moreover, he ran on a platform that advocated making Iran's nuclear program - then at a halt while negotiations were once again underway with the Europeans - a priority. Unlike his defeated opponent, who said he would "work to improve relations" with the US, Ahmadinejad claimed "he would not seek rapprochement".

In other words, instead of deterring or ending the Iranian nuclear effort, the US invasion and botched occupation encouraged and accelerated it, lending it national prestige and rallying Iranian public opinion to the cause.