I think Westerners should be wary of cheering 'reformers' too hard, and it's not just because of the Iraq war and Bush's hostility. They come in looking like cultural imperialists trying to impose different (or relativistic, if you want to derogatory) values on Arab and Persian countries. These cultures are a lot older than Western culture, and whatever political changes arise in these regions will be largely a result of their own experiences. But whatever they are, and however far-reaching they are, they will certainly not fall into the simplistic notions still held by many in the West, with liberal democracy on one side and theocracy on the other side.
First, as far as I know, our cultures (West) and their (Arab, Persian) are all so old, they all come from Mesopotamia and the religions have the same origin (Abraham), with the same "God".
Then, I agree, West wanna apply its model and its thought all over the world, without really taking care of differences of cultures, of the different ways of thinking. It quite works all over the world but not in Muslim countries, at least not so much.
This said, I think the Iranian population is the more open-minded of the Middle-East to West. The time of the Islamic Revolution is far now, no more really popular and when it happened it was not so much to answer to religious conservatism but a big part was just to support a revolution, a change of regime (and West loved and supported it at the beginning). I think the Iranian population is more nationalist, Persian, than Islamic Shiite, and I think the current gov play more on the nationalist thread than on the religious one. This said, I think we must say that religion has still some importance in this country, and the current gov is, to me, as Islamic as nationalist, with religious fanatics in it.
So, I think that West could avoid a conflict with Iran by being very nice with it, by saying: "OK, we trust you concerning your nuclear program when you say it is pacifist and we stop the sanctions against you". I think such a rhetoric could be a possibility to avoid a conflict, and supporting the Iranian economy would guarantee West to have friendly Iranian govs, because Iranian chose the hard-conservatives because of their poorness, as it happens in most of the countries all over the world when the population is poor.
I think the only way to impeach this to work would be that Iranian elections are not fair. What I don't know.
So, to resume, or West says to Iran we want to be your friend, we trust you and we respect you, and so that West has chances to have an important friend in the Middle East and to avoid a big conflict (to me it could be a major one). Doing this and changing the West attitude if Iran clearly doesn't respect it after, but at least I think West should try this way in order to have Iran as friend and to avoid a maybe very large conflict.
Otherwise, if West doesn't want to do it, what is it waiting for attacking this country? That an hard conservative, maybe fanatics, Iranian regime, which West's current attitude permit to be stronger, has nuke bomb? We must be logical:
We trust or we don't trust...
