What exactly is going on with Iran these days? The traditional dichotomy--so eloquently phrased by Bush as "you're either with us or against us"--just doesn't seem to apply...
The American public doesn't support military action against Iran, although polls do suggest "they" do think that the Iranian regime is a threat to the US. Seriously? It's about as valuable to poll the average American about the threat from Iran as it would be to get a team of third graders to solve the space shuttle's flying foam problem.
The Mujahedin-e Kalq organization is the Saddam-era insurgent group funded by Saddam... and they're a US State Department designated foreign terrorist organization. THEN WHY IS THE US GOVERNMENT FUNDING THEM? (Source 1 2 3 4 5) Whoa... that's a good question.
See, during the Iraq war we were initially targeting the MEK encampments--bases inside Iraq along the Iranian border from which the MEK staged attacks against the Iranian regime. Pretty quickly we realized that "these guys aren't pro-Saddam, they're anti-IRAN, and so are "WE"! So we stopped bombing them, and since then have been quietly, covertly supporting an insurgency in Iran that is very much like our interventions in El Salvador, Nicaragua, etc. during the '80s.
So why is the Bush administration funding a marxist-secular revolutionary group in Iran? Specifically, the MEK marxist-secular organization which is also the group that Saddam used to repress the Kurds and Shi'a in Iraq--people who are now ostensibly our allies? Something tells me that the Kurds and Shi'a wouldn't be that happy that we're backing the MEK. The Shi'a aren't just standing still on the issue--they know. They've taken the BADR brigades (the Iranian backed, pro-shia group that fought Saddam before he became a 'constant gardner') and "dismantled them", taking the senior officers and installing them in all the leadership positions of the "new Iraqi army"--especially the special forces units--which they're now using in a classic tribal "erratic retaliator" strategy, killing Sunnis to spread the general perception of the new Shi'a power in Iraq.
But since the Shi'a politicians (elected!) are largely pro-Iranian (especially the Sharistani element), the US can't just sit back and let this whole democracy concept backfire on them, turning Iraq into a quasi-Iranian puppet state. So they're funding the MEK. Why can't the US just support the "legitimate" democratic opposition, the pro-capitalist, pro-US, pro-freedom and democracy and apple pie crowd? Easy--because those people are patriotic Iranians, and they want Iran to control Iran's oil. The US can't have that--they need Iran's oil, and they can't be bothered to pay market price for it, so they need to put a group in power (MEK) that they can control via the classic "exploitation policy" to control a country by putting a distinct minority party in power with US support. What would the Iranian-majority patriots do if they had their way? They're already doing it: they're building an oil and gas pipeline to India--a direct threat to the continuation of hydrocarbon supply to "the West".
Can't have that...problem is that the US has already cried wolf once with Iraq, and are having an increasingly difficult time convincing the world of the ongoing necessity and legitimacy of their actions. In order to get their way with Iran, look out for a whole new quiver of tactics and underhanded, covert imperial tools. The US already made the mistake of saying "we need to support democracy". The budding "democracy" in Iraq will be the biggest policy mistake that the US made in the region (from the neocon perspective). Democracy in Iran would be an even greater problem--one could make an argument that Iran already is democratic, and that is the source of the problem! Iran, over the next decade, will be a proving ground for the tactics first developed in Indonesia, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. And concurently in Colombia.
This is not a conflict of "western democracy vs. evil tyrants." This is a conflict of "western, self-interested elites and their second/third world partners vs. the broader populist movements everywhere that want a more equitable distribution of wealth and power." The fundamental ideological fire that fueled the cold war has not gone away, it has only morphed. What was capitalism vs. communism has come home and shown its true colors: this is hierarchy vs. rhizome. You just knew I would come back to that one way or another!