More on Iran

I recall candidate Obama going off to Europe and meeting with Heads of Govt. We really have to get off the argument that we are going to lay down the markers. The Iranians are capable of campaigning and talking to visiting American firemen. The notion that whom we meet with will affect their election is misleading at best. The idea that Ahmedi..can capitalise on such meetings suggests that you don't think much of Iranian voters. We have a collection of them here who vote party no matter what.

and also convey the impression that we're backing a horse in that race. But I'd be wary about dealing with Ahmadinejad before the elections, since that would convey the impression that we take him seriously
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In other words we should avoid the appearance of backing a particular horse in the race, but in the other hand we should unabiguaously back a particular horse.
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I'm afraid you can't have it both ways. Consider for a moment how the fact that many foreign leaders appeared to be openly pulling for Obama. Yet, they had no choice but to continue to deal with BushCo in the meantime.
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I'm of the mind that we have to deal with the Iranian government we have, not the one we wish we had.

PS. I can spell - I just can't type....

Good news! Some one is going to jail finally for lying to Congress. Its a baseball player who lied about taking steriods. We apparently have time for these type of investigations, but not for any that would shed light on how every federal agency fell down on the job during the last 8 years or to find out how the real truth behind the economic crises we find ourselves in. Remember, no one is above the law particularly if you taint the good name of baseball. Tainting the good name of the United States. Not so much.

@gunny: Well put!
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OT (but in a similar spirit): Are the Wall Street CEOs going to be required to take $1 salaries the way the Detroit 3 were? Or, does 1 Mid-America Buck = 500,000 NYC Bucks? Just askin'
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Joe: Good post and link. Frankly, I would not be surprised if Ahmadinejad's rhetoric cools off significantly now that a grown up is in the White House. Progress on the Israel-Palestinian issue would also take a lot of hot air out of his sails.
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Question: When in Mitchell due in the mid-east?
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Question: How 'bout those Israeli election results? feedback? word on the street? You hinted that Livni might win in an earlier post and she appears to have done just that...uh...now what?

Based on the structure of the second and third sentences, I assume Joe Klein is not trying to have it both ways. He believes that the benefit of (to run this metaphor into the ground) backing the rest of the field is greater than the cost of doing so. He's merely allowing for the possibility that Ilan Goldenberg may be right.
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I agree with the last sentence of the linked post:

It's not clear to me that you can't start a dialogue with the Iranians even as you move on those separate tracks.

So much uncertainty. Does Richard Holbrooke have US-Iranian dialogue-starting powers within his portfolio? Who can say?

"We need to convey a complexity and suppleness in our diplomacy, a comprehensive sense of Iran's region and needs, if we expect to be taken seriously."
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Trying to decide and develop policies that's in their interests, as well as ours . . . what a novel idea !
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Hope someone has pulled their copy of "The Shah Era: US Dealings with Iran - Prologue and Epilogue" and is willing to spend some time reviewing that and applying it to the present situation.
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Definitely wouldn't want to repeat that clusterf**k again.

This is the closest I've come to agreeing with Joe Klein for quite some time. Let's not give Ahmedinejad any more legitimacy than he deserves (which is to say, as little as possible). Obama's "dear Mahmoud" letter was a mistake, as all it did was provide the Iranians with an opportunity to lecture the United States on all the things it must do before Iran would deign to share a table. Ahmedinejad doesn't care about overtures or compliments, he cares about hard political realities, the calculus of cost and benefit, and he will do what he can to advance his power and his ideology.

Where I disagree with Klein is in his (apparent, at least) disregard for the missile shield. There are thousands of nuclear bombs around the world, and numerous state and non-state actors who would

Containment was possible when we were dealing with leaders of states, for whom the cost/benefit analysis of mutually assured destruction could serve as deterrence. Right now we have thousands of nuclear missiles around the world, terrorist organizations that could seek to procure and launch them (organizations with no state that could be threatened with mutual destruction), and some state leaders who cannot be trusted to act rationally. So, if we have the capacity to protect ourselves against nuclear missiles...you're saying we should *not* put that capacity in place? Or perhaps Klein is suggested we should put the bases elsewhere. Russia will still seek to gain from the situation, but Russia is going to have to adjust. Given the power to protect our people from nuclear attack, *of course* we should do it. Any administration that fails to do so is failing in its most fundamental responsibility.

My two cents.

Oops, sorry for the editing mistake! And I forgot to add the . in between paragraphs. Still getting used to this place.

Holbrooke starts out with the disadvantage of having neither the groundwork nor the framework for negotiations already in place. He's starting from scratch. Having previously been labeled as one member of the "Axis of Evil", the Iranians may be taking the idea of constructive engagement with a grain of salt. Our foreign policy changes with our elections. Our previous stance of not talking to them until they made unilateral concessions was a dismal failure. They became even more isolated from the world community. Engagement may not yield the results we hope for, but the alternative produced zero results.

ahitophel-
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I suppose that would make sense if there were a missile shield. But there isn't. Much better to pursue non-proliferation, which starts with the US reducing its nuclear stockpile.

ahithophel,
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How do you threaten an organization without borders (stateless) with mutual destruction by nuclear attack? Where do you target your response?
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I guess the issues with missile defense that bothers me the most are these: first, how well does it work? 100%? 50%? 10%?
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Will it protect against launches worldwide or just close to where the system is located? Can it protect ANY target in the US? How about sea launched missiles from close to our shores? Low level cruise missiles? How is it regarding dealing with decoys?
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Honestly, I'm more worried about a terrorist org buying/stealing one from Russia and putting it in the back of a Ryder rental truck to be driven into the heart of a major city to be set off than I am with some fanatic group getting their hands on a complete launch platform.
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Our history in the middle east has been that of lurching from one crisis to another. We supported the Shah because he bought our weapons and gave us support in the region. (We turned a blind eye to his excesses and complaints from the Iranian citizenry until it was too late.) Then, when he was overthrown, we shifted support to Iraq and Hussein because they would offset our new enemies the Iranians.
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Without a little vision on someone's part, this circle of misery in that part of the world is gonna continue. If talking a little more with our potential enemies can remove some of the pressure and possibly make things a little safer by making us appear that we are taking others viewpoints seriously (for the first time in a LONG time), then I'm all for it.

The Persians have internal problems and external paranoias, yet they remain protected by their Russian benefactors and partners in trade (including fresh weapons and nuke parts). And, of course, their leadership is absolutely NUTS -- kind of like North Korea, with a smattering of Western-educated stifled every election season.

[Liberals like to rake Reagan over the coals for naming the USSR the totally appropriate Evil Empire, and unfortunately the Soviet dregs still run the show in that drunken ship of mis-state.]

Diplomacy with Iran will go about as far as it has with North Korea and Cuba and Chavez and Evo, i.e. no place that actually helps the masses yearning to be at least yeast infection free.

Until they renounce their intentions against Israel and the West, without reservations, they should be relegated to the scrap heap of human history, and treated as such.

Anything less IS Neville Chamberlain.

To be clear, Russia enjoys Iran being a thorn to the West, and Biden would do well to instruct Hillary to tell Obama via Halfbright for the benefit of Holbrooke referencing Gore...

Honestly, how many more DEATH TO AMERICA and DEATH TO ISRAEL rallies will it take, for the bleeding hearts to finally come around to the truth that most others see without any need for media intervention?

Iran builds and exports terrorism, has killed thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq and others throughout the Mideast with their exports of weapons and terrorist training -- and the nitwit press and Obamites want to unilaterally surrender history to these murderers?

We should not hit them with legalisms and treaty offers.

We should hit them with an ULTIMATUM -- and then ACT on it when they hesitate.

We're going to have to do it, eventually.

May as well be sooner than later, for everyone's sake.

I'm just saying...

Then on to Yemen, Saudi, and Indonesia.

Strange thing, hulagate . . .
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At the same time Reagan was calling the USSR an "evil empire", military members and their spouses were attending briefings on this same USSR that, in effect, revealed that their families and military members were as human and patriotic about their country as we were. (These same US military members would have been tasked, in their normal duties, to have destroyed that same USSR if asked to do so but SOMEONE higher up here wanted them to know the people on the other side of the table.)
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They (the citizens of the USSR) were no more all communist because their leaders were of that persuasion than we were all Republican or Democrat because that's what our President was. They wanted bread on the shelves and the trains to run on time, like we did.
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I've always wondered how this country would have reacted if we had been invaded during WWII, had half of our cities flattened, with 20 million plus casualties from war and starvation.
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We have gotten a little taste of that with 9-11. How did we do?

Why not negotiate with Iran now? The North Vietnamese demonstrated a very effective model for negotiating without a deadline. The US isn't on a deadline that I can see.
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Who knows? Maybe Ahmadinejad might feel some deadline pressure. He might make the agreement the US wants so he can present the agreement to the Iranian electorate. If he doesn't make a desirable agreement, wait him out.

There is a downside to successful diplomacy. What happens if peace breaks out? Is that something we really want to burden our children with?

"There is a downside to successful diplomacy. What happens if peace breaks out? Is that something we really want to burden our children with?"
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sacredh,
That's a terrible thing to say. Oh, the horror . . .

Afguy, that was my point, that deterrence does not necessarily work in the present context--and thus the need for a missile shield, since we cannot count on the assurance of mutual destruction to prevent the launching of nuclear weapons.
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Where jayackroyd gets the impression that "there is no missile shield," I have no idea. I don't believe he is fully or properly informed. Successful tests have been carried out, and there's little doubt that we could produce a missile defense system that would greatly enhance our capacity to survive a nuclear attack. But even if the shield is only 50% effective...if you heard a missile was launched, wouldn't you rather have a 50% chance than a 0% chance?
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It seems to me that this is a no-brainer.

More of Iran? This is more? I say it is less. Is less more? More or less? JK's foreign policy observations are definately less, more than more, more or less.