How much do you want to bet that the next protest from the left will be against President Bush’s decision to designate Iran’s revolutionary guard as a terrorist organization? That the Bush administration was planning to do this has been out there for weeks, ever since it was first reported by The New York Sun’s Eli Lake on July 13. Yesterday the New York Times dawdled in with a dispatch asserting that the move would signal a “more confrontational turn in the administration’s approach to Iran.” We would have used the phrase a “more realistic turn.”

The Times says this would mark the first time America has listed as a terrorist organization the armed forces of another nation. The revolutionary guard is different than any other armed forces in that one of its chief missions is to support ununiformed terrorists who attack civilians. Critics of the president will say that there is no proof that Iran’s military plays any such role in stoking terrorism. For that to make sense one must assume that terrorism is like a drifting ether afflicting otherwise peaceful Muslims who merely react to American and Israeli policies.

Critics will bemoan the timing of all this, coming as it does at a moment when our envoys meet in Baghdad to discuss of all things the security of Iraq that Iran’s revolutionary guard has done so much to undermine. As the Democratic party’s favorite non-proliferation expert, Joseph Cirincione, told the Washington Post, “All of us want to back Iran into a corner, but we want to give them a way out, too. [The designation] will convince many in Iran’s elite that there’s no point in talking with us and that the only thing that will satisfy us is regime change.”

The truth is we have been giving Iran a way out since we signed the Algiers Accord of 1981 officially ending the first of many Iranian hostage crises. We apologized for the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup that consolidated the power of the Palavis. The Israelis sold them missiles to release American and European hostages from the clutches of Hezbollah. We dealt them into the reconstruction of Afghanistan and allowed their old Shi’ia proxies to form the ruling coalition in Iraq that replaced Saddam. Mr. Bush has offered to have the west build Iran’s nuclear reactors if only the Islamic Republic would adhere to its original promise to suspend uranium enrichment.

Each time we’ve reached out to Iran, the mullahs have scoffed — and escalated the stakes. Whether it’s arming the Taliban in Afghanistan or funding both Sunni and Shi’ia terrorists in Iraq, Iran has declined our olive branch. Some in the Cirincione set would like to explain away this bellicosity by saying Iran is responding to the occasional tough rhetoric of the president and the neoconservatives. If only Mr. Bush had not included Iran in the “axis of evil,” the theory goes, then Iran and America would be allies against Al Qaeda.

Taking this line of argument is tantamount to advocating on behalf of a regime perfectly willing to speak for itself. When the real power brokers in Iran do speak, and not the stooges the Persians send to New York and Europe to gull the likes of Mr. Cirincione and Professor Mearsheimer, another soft-liner on the Iranian regime, we see their true intensions. Whether it’s President Ahmadinejad’s promise to wipe Israel off the map or Ayatollah Khamenei’s prediction that America will leave Iraq disgraced, Iran’s leaders speak louder than those who wish to engage them.

As the Democrats press for the appeasement of Iran, the leading Republican in the race, Mayor Giuliani, is raising a particularly clear voice for a more realistic approach. Writing in this month’s Foreign Affairs, the Republican front-runner says: “The Islamic Republic has been determined to attack the international system throughout its entire existence: it took U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979 and seized British sailors in 2007 and during the decades in between supported terrorism and murder. But Tehran invokes the protections of the international system when doing so suits it, hiding behind the principle of sovereignty to stave off the consequences of its actions.”

The pending terrorist designation from the White House is a first step in bringing some of these overdue consequences to the regime in Tehran. The designation will make it far riskier for any remaining European and Japanese banks to partner with front companies for the revolutionary guard. The risk to a western bank’s reputation alone is enough to starve the Mullah terror army of Euros and Yen. As General David Petraeus presses the attack against Iran’s network in Iraq, this sort of hardline has a better chance at changing Iranian behavior than the promise of endless negotiations.