The Devil Made Me Do It

President Obama along with the heads of Great Britain and France made a statement that they have INTEL that Iran has the facility up and running to enrich uranium and that the facility has no international inspection regime over it and that the worst must be suspected. France announced that Iran has until DEC 2009, after the German elections, to come clean on its activities and open up for inspection. Of course al Qaeda is already threatening Germany that it is not supine enough to al Qaeda's liking and that they better elect an appeasement and withdrawal government and get out of Afghanistan. The 'or else' is implied.

Iran doubled down on the reactors and they have two such plants.

Someone came in a day late and a plant short, that being the IAEA. They missed an entire enrichment facility in Iran and now we find out about it. I should think that building such a thing might just be a little obvious and that the IAEA would have had a clue some years previous to this.

Cause for worry, no?

But let me take up a position that I do not sponsor, do not believe in, because it is one worth doing, at this point. I will take up the Leftist position on Iran and now put forward the same, exact outlook that they took on Iraq. Fun will not be had.

Say that the Devil made me do it.

First off is that INTEL is so unreliable as to be useless. When tyrants bluster about sophisticated technology, it is just that, bluster. Really they are oppressed leaders of oppressed Nations and can't help but cry out to just gain attention. They need our 'help' not our confrontation because, you know, all those spooks and spies lie all the time to get their way on foreign policy. President Bush was one of the following or all three, depending on who you listened to on what topic and when:

A) A dunce who couldn't think his way out of a paper bag.

B) A fool who would believe anything that the CIA and other leaders put in front of him.

C) An evil genius looking to rule the world.

Ahmadinejad is just like Saddam in this in that he has said multiple, different things in order to gain attention and their missiles can only take regular, everyday, common warheads that they hand over to Hezbollah. Plus he says this is for making nuclear fuel AND nuclear medicines, and who would lie about those things, right?

Second is that the US is the oppressor. We put sanctions on Iran when they took our Embassy staff captive against all forms of International Law but, hey, that was decades ago before many on the Left were even born. Its HISTORY. Ok, the armed group Hezbollah has killed US and French soldiers looking to help Lebanon out, but that was HISTORY TOO! And Iran has been tied in with the Hezbollah attacks in Argentina because Iran's friend, Syria, wanted advanced missile and nuclear technology from it. But that... well that was in HIST... oh, wait that was 1994. Can't be history. Still we put on sanctions and CAUSED all of that, its OUR FAULT if they want high tech weapons. So we should end the sanctions, no harm will ever come to us because, you know, the past is history.

Third is that there are no, real, WMDs in Iran. No one has seen them, therefore they don't exist. And trying to say they are building them and just need the radioactive material is WARMONGERING. That's oppression! If we would just be NICE to them they wouldn't be so BAD. Probably tyrannical to their own people, yes, but we can help END THAT by GIVING THEM MONEY. If we did that we could get some access to their facilities, just like we did with the oh-so-nice USSR, no? Oh, wait... well... still giving money is a lot better than war! Having to pay Danegeld is always the best way.... We don't ever need to be worried about Iran actually trying to attack us and that they did that to our Embassy which IS considered sovereign territory under international law doesn't mean they broke international law! And electing one of the people who took part in the Embassy invasion and hostage taking as the head of the Nation doesn't mean that Iran is scoffing at international law!

Fourth is that it is all a plot to get Iranian oil. Everything is a plot. On the part of the US and Europe and Iran is just responding naturally to plots against it. Its our fault. No blood for oil!!!

Fifth is that these white leaders... errrrr.... Imperialist Leaders....ahhhhh.... semi-white capitalist sycophants? Hmmmm... that works! Semi-white capitalist sycophant running dogs (yeah RUNNING DOGS, lets see them respond to that!) of BIG OIL don't care about those funny people in Iran and are just out to exploit them and their natural resources and enslave them to have to work for a living! Yeah, that's the ticket!

The above are the Devil's Advocate positions put up by the individuals and groups who derided Bush and operations in Iraq, amended lightly for Iran. I count them as the message of the SLA: Semi-conscious Liberation Army.

If the Left had any consistency, honesty or courage, those are the things they would be saying about President Obama and the situation in Iran. I know that because I've heard them all brought up as multiple 'reasons' or 'root causes' in similar venues about Iraq, just put down the Embassy bombing and such to the fact that Saddam would not keep his agreements under international law after the First Gulf War, and that his funding of Palestinian terrorists, handing out processing techniques to al Qaeda that showed up in Hekmatyar's organization in London and in Afghanistan under the Taliban are the rough equivalents to the far cozier and deeper relationship of Iran and its founding of Hezbollah.

I mean if the Left actually BELIEVED those things then Barack Obama is one of many things:

A) A dunce being dazzled by more sophisticated leaders on the global stage.

B) A fool who will believe anything handed to him by these operators.

C) Naive in thinking that Iran means any harm to the world or anyone on it outside of Iran, save for some nasty incidents that really were just an indication of how oppressed Iran is.

D) Corrupted already by 'the system'.

E) Evil Genius, save that he couldn't sell a used health plan to anyone save the far Left who wants a total government take-over of everything, immediately, for our own good.

F) Being used by 'the powers that be' , lied to by international leaders who are trying to make him the sock puppet for their oil needs, and by Ahmadinejad who is playing back and forth on the 'do we or don't we, double or nothing' game just like Saddam did. Because, really, Iran, Russia and China are much better places than France, Great Britain or the US.

Or all of them. The SLA has never been all that coherent on things.

My view?

One - Iran is a threat and a demonstrated one since the Embassy take-over. They have never apologized for that nor offered those who take part up to the US to be tried under our laws for those crimes committed on US soil at our Embassy compound.

Two - Iran is a continued threat in using an extra-national private war organization called Hezbollah to attack targets on land and at sea without warning. The list of Nations that have a Hezbollah presence is long, and even limiting it to those they have attacked still leaves you with most European Nations, a scattering of North African Nations, Argentina (if not others although tracking them out of the TBA is damned hard), the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and a few other places less savory in the old 'stans area of ex-Soviet Republics in Central Asia. For its sea-based attacks Hezbollah is a piracy operation, and by funding those Iran is also culpable for those actions under its auspices.

Three - Iran has funded 'insurgencies' in Iraq and Afghanistan with literal tons of equipment captured that have been manufactured in Iran: missiles, bombs, machine guns, explosively formed projectiles, IED components, uniforms, radios... a long, long list of training and equipment. It meddles in the politics of Iraq via Moqtada al Sadr and endorses violence in Iraq, save when al Sadr gets cold feet and needs to run for 'religious training', no doubt with AK-47s and RPGs.

Four - Iran has had nuclear weapons ambitions very close to its founding during the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were seen as 'legitimizers' for playing in the arena of Super-Power politics on an international scale. After that they just want to destroy Israel and threaten their neighbors. The first was pure hubris, of course, but not to be discounted as a starting point. The latter two have driven Iran and Iraq under Saddam, especially during their 1980's war that killed millions on both sides and saw Saddam deploy nerve gas and Iran deploy children on the battlefront. Iran, on its end, formed a close alliance with Syria that had long range missile technology, has not signed on to the Chemical Weapons convention, has tried to get enrichment facilities for its phosphate deposits so as to extract uranium from them, gulled the Swedes into selling them such a plant, had started on a bio-weapons program, and has the manufacturing and technical expertise to know the WMD issues... if not the cash to carry them out. Iran has that cash. The Israeli's bombed the attempted start-up of a Syrian/North Korean processing site for getting enriched uranium beyond 'yellowcake' concentrations. There is some expectation that Iran has shared technology with Syria in that venue. So both are proliferating WMD technology. Further Iran took part in the AQ Khan network which has workable uranium bomb designs and schematics. Also that networked served to funnel Chinese, North Korean and even some Japanese nuclear technology into the network, with Japan having Mitutoyo sell 10,000 separators on the black market in violation of all international agreements Japan signed up to.

Five - Iran doesn't give a damn about international law. It breaks treaties, proliferates WMD technology, serves as a trans-shipment point for various black market networks (including such things as heroin, cocaine, and small arms to various Hezbollah organizations), encourages black market work by Hezbollah operations, and has sought to extend power and influence via Hezbollah into The Balkans, South America, Africa, Europe proper, SE Asia, and even into North America. The North American operations run by the late Imad Mugniyah incorporated such things as tobacco tax fraud, banking fraud, black/grey market dealings, car theft (if the reports are to be believed), and shipping drugs across North America via Mexican drug gangs. Each of those have cases in the US and Canada to back them, although the car theft part is harder to ID as part of the larger Albanian ex-pat criminal organizations that Iran semi-cooperates with. They do similar with Russia, with shipments of cocaine from Hezbollah in S. America showing up in St. Petersburg (Russia) in 20 ton lots. That ain't chicken feed.

Six - Iran is run by a group of individuals who are old, about one-deep in leadership, and who have a fantasy ideology about the end times and the 12th Imam. They also want to blow Israel off the map, bring harm to the US (the Great Satan) and generally get their belief on how Islam should run the world as an operational idea. Israel has a small unannounced but widely known defensive nuclear arsenal: you attack the with nukes and you can say good-bye to the world.

Seven - The money is on Iran having one or more nuclear processing facilities with the sweet possibility they are also using some small amount of Syrian help, and possibly giving better processing technology to North Korea.

Eight - Gazprom told the Russian government a couple of years ago NOT to invest any money into the petroleum/gas infrastructure of Iran. China pulled out of a $10 billion support deal for the Iranian petroleum infrastructure. All international analysis in those sectors points to a Nation ruining their natural resource exploitation system and that now must import not only refined gasoline, but even simple natural gas from outside their country. The infrastructure of Iran is being driven into the ground as bad or possibly even worse than Saddam did by not repairing his infrastructure: at least that needed wholesale replacement due to there being no infrastructure to repair. Iran is not so lucky and will need a retail replacement with each and every single part analyzed and replaced before it all implodes in the next five years or so. Want a real oil shock? Iran can't meet its export agreements and hasn't for years now. It is a net IMPORTER of natural gas and refined petroleum products. I disagree with Dick Morris on these points, and deeply: he has gotten the direction and amount of flow of natural gas and refined petroleum products wrong, and is still thinking in 1990's terms on Iran. Russia supports Iran for its own reasons, mostly getting paid for the stuff they have already done there, some for geopolitics against the West, some for the natural gas fields and oil fields in Iran that Russia could run better than Iran can at the moment.

When you add these things up you get an Iranian government (and I do hope the Iranian people can bring this baby down) that is: tyrannical, imperial, aggressive, expansionistic and dictatorial with a lovely dash of fantasy ideology thrown in to give the thing a piquant stench. Plus its eggshell economy is about to implode. I'm not too fond of the damned government and hope that the Iranian people can find the path to liberty and freedom and get rid of it. Unfortunately they are on their own in doing so: the US has given active and vocal support of their despotic government and not even a bone to those actually laying their lives down to free their fellow countrymen.

That is a black mark against America.

A deep stain that shows how callow we can be, as a Nation, to disdain supporting those who fight for freedom and liberty in all venues, even just in rhetoric.

Pushing 'health care' when there are nuts trying to get WMDs is a pointless exercise: when you are part of a WMD attack, no health insurance in the world will pay for that. Especially if you are dead.

You want WMD Life Insurance on that, instead. Good luck in finding it after the last couple of days.

To me the Left went certifiably nuts when they could not understand that there are Levels of Confidence with all INTEL and that no INTEL is 100%. To restate: there is no INTEL that is deemed 100% accurate with confidence. You may have a high level of confidence, say 90%, but that is not 100%. If you want 100%, you must invade and find out for YOURSELF on the ground what is going on. We have to trust these analysts as they are, surprisingly, conservative and don't like to step beyond their level of confidence in anything as it can come back to haunt them for the rest of their lives when they are WRONG. That is why you do NOT put political pressure of ANY sort on INTEL: the analysts must be given leeway to operate in an environment so they can weigh what is known, what they can't know and what they are trying to infer and political views get in the way of that no end and you wind up with faulty INTEL work. I don't like political pressure on INTEL from the POTUS and I don't like it from inside Agencies trying to run their own agendas, but that is something I have looked at multiple times elsewhere and will not further that here.

We cannot run a Nation or our relationships with others on good wishes and hoping for the best, because THAT is also a fantasy ideology and doesn't deal with the way people actually do things and why. Trying to imply motives is mind reading. What people do and comparing that to what they say then allows you to derive the truthfulness of what they say by what they do: it is evidence based analysis. It is prone to have levels of confidence. That sucks. That is how the real world works. If you don't like it, then please move to an alternate reality where that does work. Trying to bring that reality here will get us all killed.

Neda died with her eyes open for a Free Iran

From twicsy, a twitter image search engine, a picture of Neda posted by bbnetworked - http://twitpic.com/7ylhh - Neda - killed by the Islamic Republic of Iran 6/20/2009 Tehran Iran - 2009-06-21 00:54:38:

Video from YouTube, may be blocked due to age restrictions:

From myself prior to this at Hot Air:

Such as it was, so shall it be:

THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER,” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

-Thomas Paine, Crisis

Well should we remember these words when others fight for freedom, and our own government place too onerous a tax upon us. It is the right of all men to be free of overbearing, authoritarian government that seeks to take all your liberty, freedom, and welfare from you in the name of doing any good, or any service be it to man or God.

Such as it was, so shall it be.

We are, again, in the times of Paine.

***

Neda died with her eyes open so that we may not shut ours.

To those who seek freedom and liberty at the cost of their lives: you have my love and thanks.

You are marching into Hell.

As we have known that, so shall we know it once again.

A Citizen of the Republic of the United States of America

The factors at play in Iran

Commentary I left, posted as-is at Hot Air:

Why won’t Iran go the way of HAMAS or Hezbollah?

Because they are being brought in to fight the Iranian people. Reports of non-Iranian Arabs taking part to assist the Baseej will leave a very, very bad taste in the mouths of those standing up to be counted. They are getting first hand experience of what going that route means: they are already at its end-point and will suffer horribly if they don’t reject them. Do remember that Hezbollah is a foreign legion of Iran, funded by Iran, led by Iranian trained leaders, and willing to fight and die for the regime. Hezbollah has grown out of control since its establishment, taking part in the narcotics trade and other black market venues, it is very possible that a turnover in the regime in Iran will cripple Hezbollah in Lebanon, but leave its other units able to get by on local resources. That was Mugniyah’s method of operation for decades before he was finally taken out. The regime now has safe havens to go to if Iran falls from the inside.

Secondly, Iran is one of the great, old civilizations in the ME and that matters to them: just as it matters in Iraq, Syria and Egypt. It is a deeply civil people who have demonstrated far more control of themselves than your typical Leftists at any WTO meeting. As Paine said it was civility which held the colonies together when things went bad, and Iran demonstrates that point, yet again. A deeply civil people will put up with abusive government until their government gets as bad or worse than having no government. Remember your basics on the self-evident truths: they apply to Iranians, too, as they are humans no matter how inhuman their leaders are.

Third is the unasked Ayatollah: Ali al-Sistani in Iraq. For decades he was the center of resistance to Saddam, and yet he walked in not to create a Mullahocracy, much to the disappointment of the Council in Iran, but to support a multi-party, multi-ethnic, multi-religion State. al Sadr lost when he lost the support of Sistani back in 2005-06, and Sistani tried to correct al Sadr and warned him not to do what he did *then*. Sistani has not commented on Iran, that I’ve seen though I still have to check, and his silence is demonstration that he means what he says… it is possible to get a representative democracy going in a majority Islamic State and *still* have other religions and ethnicities present and have a say in how to run things. That is one ancient civilization speaking to another on common ground. When Sistani walked from Iran, he turned his back on the regime and they dared not kill him for that. Sistani speaks by being alive and carrying through his outlook and beliefs, he has no need to talk about it as he has done the deeds he said he would do.

Last and not least there are reports of splintering in the IRGC and splinter groups calling on the Army to help. The Army said it would not intervene, save if external States threatened Iran. Ahmedinajad is in Russia… and gets support from Putin… Russia went through two Revolutions in 1917 and know that a conscript Army will back the people. Returning troops from the front did just that. So Putin backs the dinnerjacket. Foreign support… and if a Russian ‘advisor’ or two shows up, or Russia does some minor token of ‘help’… well I can add that up. Russia looks to repay the dinnerjacket for reneging on the contracts Russia had with Iran and not paying Russia for the work it did. Putin no more trusts the regime in Iran than the West does, but for different reasons. Wouldn’t that be a nice gift to the regime? A revolution because you didn’t stick to your contracts…

The only worrying thought on the last are reports the PKK has been attacked in Iran, not out of the ordinary for ordinary times… but these are not ordinary times in Iran. Provocation, perhaps, by the Baseej and others? Possibly. If the banner of Revolution is raised, then things will get very, very interesting in the ethnic enclaves as the Army will not leave a people in Revolution to go after the non-Persian minorities, since they are to defend their OWN people.

We live in interesting times.

***

Indeed we do... very interesting times.

Most commentators miss the larger movement of the ancient cultures: they speak to each other in a language not carried by their voices, but by their actions, and have done so since the first mud brick cities were created in the region.

I throw Russia in because Putin does have a mean streak in him: no need to look for his soul through his eyes, his actions speak for him, too.  The people of the ME know that, just like they know each other.

And what will the Kurds, Azeris and Baluchs do?  Inquiring minds want to know.

No matter where a Revolution starts it gains its own dynamic, its own timing and figures often become figureheads.  I don't trust Mousavi for his past track record, but then he has never had to live with this sort of mass uprising against a regime he helped to put in place... and where it ends spells his own fate if he doesn't do something different.  And when you have run out of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, more liberty is left as a default unless you really do like the return of warlords and the vaporization of society.  The Mullahs might like that last, Mousavi, no matter how brutal, does not appear to be that kind of man this late in life.

The word Revolution now hangs in the air in Tehran and all Iran.

If you thought the past few days were a lot, then you ain't seen nothing yet.

It's cell phones vs guns

That from GuamGuy at Twitter and I've been using Twitterfall to keep track of the events in Iran at #iraneclection, Tehran and Mousavi.  I am not a regular Twitter user, needless to say, and only got cellphones a couple of days ago as emergency use supplies.  And I do have some criticism of the technology, but that is not important.

These last five days have been monumental in breaking the way news is reported and does point to the change that technology is bringing on a global basis.  This technology is the use of networking via cell phones and the advent of that system as a complement to standard TCP/IP technology.  To refresh how we get to the point where you get news from other people who are on the spot and seeing it, and not via a 'gatekeeper' we need only step back a decade ago to the period just before rapid cellphone distribution and the first wave of information distribution that is not under the one to many paradigm.

Broadcast media (TV, Cinema, etc.) is 1:Many.  It has a single broadcast point but multiple people can pick it up.  It is also unidirectional from the broadcaster to the receiver.  This technology existed along side newspapers which were an early version of 1:Many, but only to subscribers and those who held public copies of the information.  Newspapers had limited bandwidth and low refresh rate.  Television improved both bandwidth for communication (amount of information that can be delivered per unit time) and refresh rate.  Voice and motion image delivery is a high bandwidth and high refresh rate affair for an event that can be covered.  Unfortunately the infrastructure for broadcast, like newspapers, is expensive and requires a large technical staff, and feed back is limited to those already in studios.  Television surpassed film reels for complex information delivery and made the reception cost cheap by allowing a high cost receiver to constantly receive new information, thus making it a cheap acquisition over time.

That era of news starting with the single penny 'broadsheets' all the way up to the proliferation of cable channels took 500 years to do.  Newspapers made using moveable type supplanted the previous 1:Many form of communication by bards, troubadours and town criers.  Many of those gave stories to papers for pay and invented 'reporters'.  We do not cry about the lack of Monks creating hand illuminated script, the absence of a town crier and only bards still fill an emotional need that no other media has ever supplanted... if you are ever lucky enough to find and listen to one, that is.  So we have come not to miss bards, either.

Newspapers melded over to television, but the two competed on a different basis, with television being faster and glib, as airtime that was empty was wasted time, while newspapers could do longer pieces with more research.  If the reporter ever bothered to do that, and the lack of research was always evident in both media by the method of taking something you know and see how it is reported, then remember that level of sophistication is in ALL of the paper or television media.  They looked to have a dominating stranglehold on information even into the late 1970's when television was beginning to shift reading habits to viewing habits and papers started to get into financial trouble.  Thus television became the dominant factor in 'news' 'reporting'.

A little technology developed in the 1960's to interconnect mainframe computers used a point to point messaging protocol to route messages via a non-proprietary schema.  Anyone who understood how that worked could make adapters for their systems and connect to it and exchange information.  It was developed to share processing time across computers, but found its 'killer application' in e-mail for the scientific and technical communities.  E-mail started as host system only (only the system you are on) but the networking schema allowed for e-mail to be exchanged between systems and a non-proprietary protocol was developed for it.  The Advanced Research Projects Agency had asked for the protocol to be developed not to survive nuclear war, but to share expensive processing time amongst those who owned mainframes and did government work.  The exchange of ideas, though, proved a huge boon to the scientific and technical community and spurred the growth of the internetworking schema outwards to non-government backed institutions.  It is from there we get the modern internetworked computer systems: the internet is a network of networks.

What this internet technology allowed, however, was a messaging system that could be run by institutions that allowed for common posting of thoughts and ideas on topics.  Those text-based message boards of subscriber based feedback is, essentially, what Twitter is today, just spruced up for the modern era just 40 years later.  E-mail and message boards proliferated and allowed the first new form of communication that was not single point broadcast:  Many:Many.

Many to Many systems are a distribution system between all users of the system, and allow feedback and input of those users to each other.  No longer is it One to Many, with only one individual or point being the broadcaster, but Many to Many where all can look at and respond to messages.  When that was all done by technical and scientific groups the level of noise in the system was low: everyone agreed to stay on topics of common interest.  By the 1970's and early 1980's so many universities had this type of system that the non-technical message boards started to proliferate and larger numbers of individuals refused to stay 'on topic'.  Those became known as 'trolls'.  Trolls incited passions and got into heated discussions via these means and those attacks on personal integrity that would ensue were known as 'flame wars'.  By the early 1980's there was no longer a 'clean signal' of information on the message boards and any user soon learned to block posts from certain posters and 'clean up the signal'.

Some message areas became so badly over-run with trolls that download time for messages (which cost you money) soon meant seeking out a few responsible people to start NEW message boards and moderate the commentary.  Strange to say, those would stagnate as the editorial decisions of moderators would, itself, inflame passions... no one likes an editor it appears...and things continued apace.  Technology got cheaper, proliferated into businesses, into the home and use of the internet by the 1980's was growing outside of traditional government and academia circles.  Other messaging systems for telephones from MCI and AT&T appeared and some of those were crossed with internet technology in the early 1990's.  Limited network organizations, like AOL, formed for home users to communicate with other subscribers, but the use of internet communication and adoption would force each of those smaller concerns to open up their network to the internet.

The handwriting was already on the wall for newspapers in the early 1980's, and by the 1990's it was apparent to those inside the industry that something was making newspapers obsolete.  Television viewership was reaching a peak and most blamed TV for the ills of newspapers, and no one took the unmoderated, troll-infest, flame-war prone internet seriously, save at the technical conferences I attended in the 1994-99 era.  There the 'New Media' was being talked about by early adopters and the ability to have single owner message systems, where that individual could put up a post and get feedback soon became known as the web-based log.  Web technology is an add-on to TCP/IP and rides on it, using look-up tables for names to translate them into IP addresses to route through TCP/IP networks.  Any single gateway to such a network can host its OWN network of TCP/IP addresses... and by putting a 'user friendly' software interface that was graphical (developed by scientists in Switzerland at CERN for displaying numerical data in visual format across networks) soon became a 'killer application' for the web.  Web-based logs (Blogs) were a start-up phenomena of 1:Bi-directional Many as commentary areas could be opened up for topics started by an author.  Instead of just sending out a personal rant, you could now insult everyone on a single topic at one go!  That said 1:Bi-directional Many had and still has a useful function in starting discussions on topics and while trolls still proliferate, the profusion of topics makes individual trollers either have to slow down (and thus think, which should make them less troll like) or devolve into simple name-callers, foul mouthed spewers of ideology, and generally act in a manner closer to grade school or kindergarten.

Blogs then have more signal to less noise, by and large, due to topicality of discussion and the ability of other bloggers to continue conversations or add ideas on at their own sites.  E-mail was the killer app for the early internet, and web-based browsing became the killer app for the internet of the 1990's, allowing everyone from stores to banks to your lone cat blogger, to put together a relatively simple site to post whatever they wanted.  Television viewership (as a percentage of Americans) was already declining: viewing hours were dropping and more people just weren't watching TV.  This was going on pre-web-based internet, and sped up during the era of 1999-2001.

Message boards still existed, and blogs co-existed and then eclipsed them, yet on some boards the dedicated messaging of small news stories held by large companies had already started.  I have, more than once, found myself on an interface to a message board archive finding obscure articles that are held nowhere else on the net.  The era of copyright, that the music industry was complaining about as their recordings were cheaply being copied, had already come into steep erosion.  In venues outside of traditional channels of information these articles were in clear violation of copyright, but had almost no value that could ever be rendered from them and would be lost without public copying.  The music industry would stagger at this as their business model was made obsolete the moment they published anything in digital format as the home computer was now able to break simple encryption schema or, alternatively, just copy an entire disc at a digital level.  Nothing can stop that.

Today the information coming from Twitter is the updated message boards of the early internet: they are open, generally unmoderated, depend on user input entirely, have trolls, and have the compelling interface of being updated by each and every message from each and every user displayed almost immediately.  This application is restricted compared to those message boards due to length of message that can be sent via cellphones.  Cellphones use a different networking system, but that can interface with the network neutral TCP/IP system at the router level, and some companies may just use TCP/IP and go through local hosting.  This still requires cell phone towers, central distribution points and can still be taken down by regimes.

The cell phones, themselves, are beneficiaries of Moore's Law, however, starting out with the Motorola Startac 'Brick Phone' of the 1980's, then going to smaller and smaller formats thereafter.  As the cost of integration of new features at the silicon level gets cheaper (via Moore's Law) new functions are cheaply added on to handsets while the price continues to decrease over time.  Today handsets are miniature network interface devices allowing voice, still imagery, video, and text to be input and transmitted.  Text messaging, like e-mail, is a 'killer application' that arose because it is cheaper to send digital text than analog to digital voice calls.  Some systems supported this at the magic 'free level' and that made each and every cell phone owner a free ranging reporter.  Individuals are outside the bounds of the older print and television media: people communicate about what interests them and don't give a damn about 'gatekeepers'.

Messaging via text, voice, still imagery and video is a complement to blogs, just as blogs were an early complement to message boards, and this can be seen as returning the favor to blogs to allow for dedicated end-user, live, Many:Many communications to take place.  Watching an active Twitter feed is engrossing because it is ongoing, live and the information is given by those who are actively seeking to promulgate messages.  There are STILL trolls, but they now inflame fewer passions given limited text space, and are easy to ignore.  People with fanatical belief that they are always right on all topics will ALWAYS exist, just they used to be put into attics and were the Aunt/Uncle no one talked about... they now have cell phones.

There is, with modern cell phones, more than one network available, however, and this is not talking about the network provider for phone, but the phone itself.  Today cell phones can have Bluetooth technology, which is a short range capability to move information between Bluetooth devices that have accepted each other's 'handshake'.  These form on-the-fly networks that are created by all devices that share handshakes digitally.  They are relatively low bandwidth, but amble enough for images and video to be moved between individuals on a timely basis.  These networks are 'ad hoc' and not centralized: there are no servers, per se, nor IP look up tables, just a list of devices held by each device, that they have shook hands with.  While these are small networks, they move, adapt and change configuration on a continual basis.  And as it is easy to erase handshakes, they form a set of devices that can easily be repurposed if a sub-network amongst agreed-upon devices is breached, although that takes some time to do.

These are then characterized as 'piconets' or as a Personal Area Network (as opposed to Local Area Network or Wide Area Network technologies which need centralized numbering and addressing systems).  In conception, every device on a piconet can be a server, router and be a network communication device passing information across the trusted network at a LAN/WAN or TCP/IP level... right up to the moment a trusted, connected device to the internet is found, which then allows for ALL stored data to be copied out into the internet.

Although that technology has not been used, to date, in that fashion, it points to the final breaking of authoritarian regimes having control over information.  Indeed, as such regimes border Nations that do NOT have restrictions on comms, LAN and WAN technology can be used to bypass firewalls and communicate with the larger internet world.  Satellite phones add into that, as trusted network devices, but are rare and high cost to use/maintain.  With Moore's Law the ability of piconets to reach outwards, morph, and never be fixed by location or even device, means the next threshold of personal technology to communicate with the world is nearly here.

It will not make obsolete the older, network neutral, systems as they have a great purpose in coordinating all comms via neutral protocols.

What does this mean for older technologies?

For newspapers it is not a death-knell, but a bottomless pothole.  Newspapers and other print media have hidden behind a mask of 'objectivity' while not providing 'objective' coverage of news.  That is 'Just the Facts Ma'am' or 'Joe Friday' news.  The moment you hear a reporter say 'human interest' or 'human side' of the story, you know that is no longer objective reporting.  Whenever a reporter or editorial board does not come clean with their ideological bias in how they operate, they are not being 'objective'.  One can still HAVE bias in reporting, and it is, indeed, insane to think otherwise: you think, are alive and are human, therefore you are biased.  The mask of 'objective' reporting can and indeed must be dropped to survive.  Magazines that have done so still have a committed readership and that indicates a market for biased covering of news and topics so long as the publication is absolutely clear on its position.  Individuals can and do weed out bias to get to news... watching a Twitter feed indicates that, alone.  There is no need for a 'gatekeeper' once the fence is taken down, and the fence is not that high any more and it is gone in some areas.  Those that continue on with the charade of 'objectivity' will step into a bottomless pothole, those that avoid that will not... most are stepping into the pothole.

Television has tried 'interactive TV' and failed, multiple times.  As the ethos of news presentation followed that of newspapers, the remedy for TV news is the same: identify the bias of the editorial board and reporters, and just report the damned news.  Save 'human interest' for 'entertainment' venues outside of news reporting.  Again, the gate has no fence and the gatekeeper is an antiquated figure, like the coachman holding a lantern.  Great for a lawn ornament, but not so hot for your Ford.  Television news also faces the 'bottomless pothole' dilemma in ratings, and very few news organizations are adapting to this new future.  They will go the way of bards, troubadours and Monks hand illuminating manuscripts along with their friends in the print media.

Blogs are adaptive media: bloggers have wide interests in various areas and with various forms of presentation, and the web-based log will only become more personalized to the interest of the presenter.  Because it is a highly representative form of presentation, those that come to them will adapt to those that present information in a way they like.  Bloggers are far more open about bias than their print and TV counterparts, when they have counterparts, which many do NOT as there is no way to do on 1:Many what 1:Many bi-directional with add-ons does.  There is no equivalent to Many:Many unmoderated anywhere in print or TV, due to restrictions of the medium used.  Many:Many can and most likely will serve as the basis for future 'news' as multiple individual witnesses recount information and cross-confirm events.  'Fact checking' for ongoing events goes from months, weeks, days or hours, to hours, minutes and seconds.  That is the derived Feiler Faster Thesis at work, for information uptake and understanding of information.

Twitter has brevity on its side, which forces personal editing and getting to facts quickly.  Noise can be reduced, and will be by individual... and it might be hell for those seeking to be rabble-rousers to know that they are putting out their words but that no one is picking them up any more... so sock puppets will appear and suffer the exact, same thing.  The ability of individuals to censor what they take in is a great Liberty, and learning that you are speaking only to yourself is a great goad to civility.  I am sure that text comms will open up, but here form factor of device means that actually getting a coherent long message out can't be done quickly, like on a laptop or PC: editing yourself takes space and time, and there is little screen space currently available and that is driven by form factor (it must fit in your hand) and NOT technology.  You can only see so much, and the form factor becomes the medium, thus driving messaging type.  Small videos and still images will be primary, text simple and limited until a major form factor change takes place or we replace our visual input system with something else.

To sum up: the Iranian revolt/uprising is now being communicated by multiple means (those helping to get secure gateways up and keep them up have been a godsend to Iran, plus those getting out information on how to anonymously report) is pointing to the true future of news.  It will be self-reported.

And the revolution will be self-organized.

To the people of Iran in your days of strife

As an American I have always appreciated the great gifts of civilization that Persia and later Iran would bring to our world. While one side of the divide that is athwart Europe, Asia and Africa, your peoples have always exhibited a dignity and respect amongst themselves that is deep and abiding. Your suffering under tyrants, thugs and dictators of many stripes over the millennia have demonstrated your strength as a society, a people and a Nation.

I support you in your days of trouble to try and wrest justice from the grasp of injustice, and security from the heart of unreason.

The involvement of my Nation and other Nations in the affairs of your people is not a simple one: there is no easy point in time to say that things were ever neat, clean or easy between us. From Darius and Xerxes onwards has been interaction good and bad that exists between the hearts of our cultures, and yet, throughout all that, the basic and common respect and decency within Persia, within Iran, has been steadfast. I do not blame your people for the ills of ancient tyrants and Emperors, nor can offer apology for the works of men like Alexander or Belisarius. Their wit and skill on the battlefield has been demonstrated between peoples for those same millennia and we marvel at the ingenuity, courage and bravery of all of them, and Persia is no exception. Ever.

From the late 19th century your peoples have had problems ordering their affairs amidst the tumult of competing groups, and this has been true of all Nations, weak and strong alike. I cannot offer apology for the removal of the Pro-Nazi Shah, nor for the return of him once your political order seemed to be on the verge of subjugation by a worse order of tyrant than any Shah had ever been. As I grew up seeing the rise of the new totalitarianism of religion in your land, once an Ally of America, I, in my youth wept and grew angry with your people, until I could grow and learn the true horror that was being inflicted upon you by those that took the reins of power to themselves.

From there the trouble of the regime are not yours, as a people, even as they claim to speak for you. I know this because they would not let the people of your ancient culture speak for themselves. Whenever I see that happen in any land, where a dictator, tyrant, or any authoritarian regime claims to speak for their people but keep their people muzzled, I see the heart of darkness and the mask of lies.

I have given worry to your situation and how awful, how despotic, your rulers are, and I do not like what I see and how those rulers see you, the people of Iran, as pawns to be used and expended in their game of power and tyranny. They fall into the templates of terror, as do others, to enforce their view of the world upon the world and are willing to hurt you, the people they should be protecting, to gain their ends.

What my Nation and others started in 1999 was left undone and cost many in your neighbor's country their lives, and showed that my Nation was not willing to back its words of supporting those willing to fight a tyrant with our own power so that they could make good his removal. Only in these past 6 years have we, now, moved to exculpate that debt to your neighbors to shift that status quo of tyranny so that our blood will mix with theirs in the everlasting sand, so as to establish that peoples in your region of our fair world can, indeed, build for themselves, speak for themselves and protect themselves. My people cannot ease yours, now, because of that and wanting your neighbors to succeed costs us dearly as any project does that tries to give space to liberty and freedom which is the self-evident right of all mankind. We were once willing to bear any cost for helping those seeking liberty and freedom, but our earthly capacity is now limited and we do not know what the true cost of not sustaining those things are.

I cannot speak better than my forefathers of the Nation in this, so I let him speak for me on this in your time of troubles:

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform, and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him out of two evils to choose the least. WHEREFORE, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows, that whatever FORM thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

In order to gain a clear and just idea of the design and end of government, let us suppose a small number of persons settled in some sequestered part of the earth, unconnected with the rest, they will then represent the first peopling of any country, or of the world. In this state of natural liberty, society will be their first thought. A thousand motives will excite them thereto, the strength of one man is so unequal to his wants, and his mind so unfitted for perpetual solitude, that he is soon obliged to seek assistance and relief of another, who in his turn requires the same. Four or five united would be able to raise a tolerable dwelling in the midst of a wilderness, but one man might labour out of the common period of life without accomplishing any thing; when he had felled his timber he could not remove it, nor erect it after it was removed; hunger in the mean time would urge him from his work, and every different want call him a different way. Disease, nay even misfortune would be death, for though neither might be mortal, yet either would disable him from living, and reduce him to a state in which he might rather be said to perish than to die.

Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which, would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this remissness will point out the necessity of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.

-Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776.

I do, indeed, recognize the difference between the People of Iran and those that govern your Nation.

As my Nation heads into a time of troubles, there is scant more than I can offer you than my support, so that the Free People of Iran will step forward from the darkness of their plight and know that the Tree of Liberty is ever nourished by the blood of tyrants and patriots.

May that Great Tree grow so we can suffer over the losses of the patriots and establish the shade of Liberty and create Freedom in that shade as an everlasting good to be guarded.

And as you quest for that Great Tree to take root, my own fellow citizens come to recognize the awful price that must be paid by us to sustain our Great Tree and that its continued shade must be gained at great cost.

As it is written, so it is true that peace is always to be sought but it cannot be ensured without the cost of blood upon the civil sword as that is the required nourishment of Liberty to provide the shade of Freedom for all Mankind. The cost of not doing so is servitude for yourselves and your children until the price of Liberty outweighs any earthly cost.

My hand of friendship is open to the Free People of Iran. Just as it is to your neighbors in Iraq. And to all free peoples willing to pay that heavy cost, as we must sorrow together to secure that cost and know that such payments are well worth any monetary loss but can never, ever be covered by them. It is not an easy place to stand, under the shade of the Great Tree of Liberty. But one can stand free in no other place.

My deepest sorrows to the Free People of Iran.

May they win their Freedom to secure Liberty.

You are not alone.

Russia, Georgia, Iran, Ukraine all get connected

It is time to look back at previous posts and see what there is to see on the topics of the day, which apparently look to be a fledgling democracy that helped the US getting snuffed out by a tyrant.  Well, 'look' may not be the appropriate word at this point...

Still, we will head back in my past posts and start to examine the origins of these things, which will not start with Georgia or Russia, but Iran!  Chronologically they go first and looking at the problems there will help to give link-back to the current conflict.  That is not to say that the source of this is in Iran: it isn't.  Some of it goes back at least a thousand years or more to the ethnic groups moving through the Caucuses and that you can go back all the way to the last glacial period.  Luckily we will start with the problems that the Mullah's self-inflicted on Iran, and that starts with Iran's Oil Problem.  That spurred on some letters between myself and M. Simon at Classical Values and got us to the Oil Outlook on Iran.  From there a post at Instapundit by Glenn Reynolds on the decaying infrastructure of Iran as seen by Michael Ledeen at NRO, is all a part of much of the same work:  the Mullah's don't know how to keep a technocratic society going.  From that I will set the stage with one more post of my own on The shockwaves of 5%, where jihad meets economics.

Iran has got a problem.

It has a technically backward and socially retrograde ruling caste that has no comprehension of modern markets, modern technical infrastructure nor how to utilize one to affect the other.  Their attempts to coerce foreign producers into contracts, which then have a regime (not market) flexible pricing schedule means that you cannot forecast if anything gotten from Iran, as a company, will be higher, lower or at market prices.  Iran rewards those it likes, punishes those they don't and have been suffering an economic boycott first from the US and, lately, from Japan.  Japan took an extra step of telling *its* trading partners that it didn't look kindly towards those that support Iran.  What this has meant is that technical upkeep of the entire Iranian petroleum industry (natural gas included) has been slowly going to hell since 1979.  This has capped their oil output as no major marginal increase in oil production nor any new exploration has been run by the regime since that point in time.  It has all been private companies 'under the gun' at best, and in many cases that has not proven to be a good investment.

By subsidizing the use of gasoline and natural gas at far below market prices, these two were used uneconomically and increased the interior demand curve of them inside Iran.  When production is basically flat or on a very low marginal expansion rate, and domestic use soars the result is that the amount of difference between the production and domestic use diminishes.  This has a word associated with it:  export.

Now as Iran started out with incredible production vice its population, that could go on a good long time with no one noticing that the folks keeping the store had wandered off.  What this has meant is oil lost in the petroleum system inside Iran due to old equipment, leaks and inefficient refineries... very inefficient refineries.  Outside of normal natural gas deposits a prime way to get natural gas (one carbon atom with four hydrogen atoms called methane) is to crack longer chain molecules in crude oil at a refinery.  Lots of smaller carbon chains and single carbon atoms go flying off and these are lighter byproducts that can serve other uses.  So, beyond natural deposits, well run refineries can yield natural gas and that is a wonderful commodity on the open market and has ready buyers globally.  The main indicator for the refineries not being run well is not, immediately, natural gas but normal gasoline to put into your car.

Iran, if it had kept its refineries up to date and wasn't losing oil in them due to pure waste (inefficient methods to retain not only oil but its byproducts) should meet its internal market, even when it is subsidized.  This year Iran has had to start purchasing refined gasoline at world market prices and realized that a subsidy on *that* meant a net outflow of cash from the regime in this area.  Well, they had lots of money from the boom in the oil markets, right?

Consider that one of the best ways (and cheapest) to rejuvenate old oil fields is to re-pressurize the with a nice, stable molecule in that environment: natural gas.  The actual amount of natural gas has been declining for use in this area inside Iran for some years if not more than a decade.  We know this as after the Gazprom review of Iran's infrastructure in 2004-05 (and possibly longer) Gazprom basically said: 'forget about it'.  If a system is bad enough so that those having to tend to the old Soviet gas system in Russia don't want anything to do with it, then it is in horrific condition.  Further the only place that Iran could easily purchase natural gas was Turkmenistan.  Well, that had been going on for a long time and gas flowed easily...

Until this year, that is.

Starting in JAN 08 Turkmenistan had 'repair problems' in supplying Iran with natural gas, and it turns out the amount Iran uses is 5% of its internal market.  Yes, there has been a natural gas shortfall in Iran which it had been making up by purchasing natural gas from a neighbor.  I do have trouble imagining any petroleum exporting nation with refineries needing natural gas.  Or needing gasoline, come to think of it, given the size of the population.  Run the longer chain stuff through the refineries and aim at natural gas plus other light hydrocarbon gases.  I mean they still export oil, right?

Well, not up to the OPEC quota, no.  Iran actually has excess quota it has to sell to keep up with OPEC but can't meet the quota.  Hasn't been able to do that for awhile now.  Which meant the Saudis have been pumping like crazy to cover the Iranian shortfall because if OPEC can't make its target quotas, it soon becomes an unreliable part of the world oil market, and starts to seriously lose what market heft it has left.  Of course now Venezuela is having problems with that, too, but that is another story of another rising tyrant.

That then starts to get to the point of Micheal Ledeen's look at the Iranian electricity infrastructure which is going to hell.  Now one can posit that it is for the separation of radionucleotides, and get worried.  Another view, simpler and far more direct, is to ask: just how much of their system depends on natural gas fired electricity plants?  Even as a minor part of the infrastructure, say sub-5%, it is the first part to feel natural gas shortfall shockwaves when an outside supplier starts playing with natural gas pressure levels and amounts.  I expect the electrical grid in Iran is in about the same shape as its petroleum industry: not so good and decaying rapidly.  Now who would be playing with that natural gas supply?

To answer that requires going to the natural gas article I put up: Natural gas, crime and destruction.  One of the prominent figures trying to make the transition from the black/gray market criminal world to the gray/white market respectable world is Dmitri Firtash, who now runs Group DF (GDF).  He has been able to get control over a substantial natural gas network stretching out to the far western ex-Soviet Republics and has a particularly strong tie to the ruling regime in Turkmenistan, the place where Iran is getting its 5% of natural gas from.  GDF is the latest incarnation of a group that started way back when the Soviet regime collapsed and the first laws for moving natural gas around required that a foreign company receive Gazprom natural gas once it left Russia:  no subsidiaries or anything like that.  So a group of wily investors started up a company and proceeded to skim money from that into nefarious criminal organizations.  Russia didn't like that, ended that contract and let another one... which somehow saw the exact same people in charge of the exact same set-up under a different name.  Russia didn't like that and tried again, via Ukraine, to do this one more time and even offered a 'kitty sweetener' of $10 billion/year into the bargain.  The result was exactly the same, save the organization with ties into the blacker side of things now got a $10 billion/year bonus!

Actually, that is a pretty respectable thing to do: swindle Russia three times on the exact same deal.  And get paid for it, to boot!  Vladimir Putin has found that getting rid of this legislation is well nigh impossible because that money going *out* somehow influences things inside Russia... possibly through all those corrupt government ministers that showed up in the 1990's that can't be dislodged.  So, he has to bite the bullet and pay for the privilege of letting other folks move stuff through Russian held pipelines.  Russia does get its 'cut' but, really, to have to pay for it?

Now, lets say that you are in the natural gas business, have a huge pipeline empire full of goods that you are getting on the cheap through sweetheart deals with less than nice regimes.  Lets further posit you have a long term contract that isn't flexible to market prices with one customer and market price flexible contracts with others willing to pay a whole bunch more.  What do you do?  Pretty simple, really, stiff the inflexible, lower payback folks and sell to the higher payback ones, or just stockpile the stuff someplace.  And then hint that the low-cost contract and its folks might be able to get more natural gas if they would just pay a bit more...

You now have the situation of GDF being the centralized natural gas seller, Iran being the fixed and low cost payment group and all of Europe willing to pay double or triple that amount per cubic meter, and a huge supply of natural gas slowly filling the Ukrainian system and no one willing to pay the rent for it.  What a great deal!!  Notice how much Gazprom makes off of it?  Nada.  It gets paid for bulk movement through the Russian portion of the system.  At that point Georgia serves as a major conduit for GDF to consider *bypassing* the Russian portion and linking up with natural gas supplies through a lower fee for transport system in Georgia.  Which would cut out Gazprom from that portion of the system, although it would still have a part to play in other portions.  So long as some natural gas goes through Russia, GDF gets cash to run its supply end, and if it is just purchasing from Russia and leaving it to supply it to the Ukrainian border, so much the better.

Ukraine has been a problem for Russia as it has tried to sway things there and has found that others have more ability to do so than it does, as a number of oligarchs use the local industrial base to leverage assets in Russia ( as seen in my original Red Mafia article and After the fall of Trans World Commodities and neither of those is particularly short as they cover over a decade and an additional seven years, respectively, and are at best thumbnails of the activity).  Putin, then, has a major and increasing problem of being able to capture western Europe market share directly as the Baltic pipeline idea is bogged down, the central routes are barricaded by groups able to maneuver around the Russian bureaucracy better than he can, and to the south there is a geographical problem of not being able to have coverage to stop the flow of natural gas (and other things) via Georgia.

Considering the alternatives of trying to lobby Finland, Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Germany, Denmark and a whole host of 'Green' groups to get a pipeline put in or paying for the privilege of having someone else work the European markets and getting paid in something less than hard currency or in turning off the spigot and trying to get that money train working to you, which would you choose?

Forget the northern route: it is years if not a decade or more away from getting someplace even if everyone agrees, and since there is such limited anchorage space in the Baltic Sea, that is unlikely.  Too many environmentalists in the West to allow that.

Having been swindled three times and now paying for the privilege of being swindled, trying to renegotiate a contract as things stand is out of the question: your own negotiators turned out to be in the pockets of the oligarchs last time just a few years ago.  The oligarchs have way more money and more readily kill anyone in the way than even Putin can do and he knows that.

That leaves taking over a small neighbor, ensuring that Iran can get supply from Gazprom systems (at market prices) and finally getting a transport system for oil, natural gas and other products that is under Russian control that heads to the West so that hard currency can roll in from it... and deprive an oligarch of 'extra' cash there. And as the new pipeline deal through the Bosporus Straits has been inked (Source: Global Insight), and it would be possible for Russia to consolidate all that lovely eastern flow into it... and you can finally cut out the worse of the oligarchs.  It starts with oil, of course, but natural gas is a part of it.

And a bit of a mess in Georgia?

If you are Vladimir Putin, this must seem a prime opportunity to stiff some folks, get some real cash flowing in, remove some middlemen and consolidate trade clout.  Just one little problem:  Georgia is damned rugged country and prime for mountain warfare, and the last time a large-size Russian force tried that was a little place called Afghanistan.  I've written about Mountain warfare and what it takes, and it isn't about tanks, aircraft or lots of troops.  It is about skill, cunning, knowing the terrain and tenacity to fight without much help from anyone. 

Taking Georgia is one thing.

Holding it is quite another.

Especially as 20% of their armed forces have been trained by the US.  And as we have been reminded there is more to Victory than just 'winning'.

Appeasement just sounds so nice

Ah, yes, when the President came out with his view on appeasement (Source: FoxNews) it seemed pretty straightforward as he was honoring the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel (Source: White House):

The fight against terror and extremism is the defining challenge of our time. It is more than a clash of arms. It is a clash of visions, a great ideological struggle. On the one side are those who defend the ideals of justice and dignity with the power of reason and truth. On the other side are those who pursue a narrow vision of cruelty and control by committing murder, inciting fear, and spreading lies.

This struggle is waged with the technology of the 21st century, but at its core it is an ancient battle between good and evil. The killers claim the mantle of Islam, but they are not religious men. No one who prays to the God of Abraham could strap a suicide vest to an innocent child, or blow up guiltless guests at a Passover Seder, or fly planes into office buildings filled with unsuspecting workers. In truth, the men who carry out these savage acts serve no higher goal than their own desire for power. They accept no God before themselves. And they reserve a special hatred for the most ardent defenders of liberty, including Americans and Israelis.

And that is why the founding charter of Hamas calls for the "elimination" of Israel. And that is why the followers of Hezbollah chant "Death to Israel, Death to America!" That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that "the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties." And that is why the President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. (Applause.)

Some people suggest if the United States would just break ties with Israel, all our problems in the Middle East would go away. This is a tired argument that buys into the propaganda of the enemies of peace, and America utterly rejects it. Israel's population may be just over 7 million. But when you confront terror and evil, you are 307 million strong, because the United States of America stands with you. (Applause.)

America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary. America stands with you in firmly opposing Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. Permitting the world's leading sponsor of terror to possess the world's deadliest weapons would be an unforgivable betrayal for future generations. For the sake of peace, the world must not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. (Applause.)

I, somehow, immediately thought of this Zucker Ad:

Hard not to, isn't it? The panel of do-gooders sponsored on a bi-partisan basis. Remember them? The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group of fine foreign policy panjandrums that have the most excellent and waffling James A. Baker III as one of its primaries, who can't seem to figure out if he is even for or against talking to terrorists and their supporters?

Really, I thought that President Bush's view was pretty straightforward, supported by historical facts in previous meeting with dictators, tyrants, and various less savory folks running their own war organizations outside the bounds of any law. Really this goes back to President Jefferson as recounted by Gerard W. Gawalt at the Library of Congress site on Jefferson's papers:

Thomas Jefferson, United States minister to France, opposed the payment of tribute, as he later testified in words that have a particular resonance today. In his autobiography Jefferson wrote that in 1785 and 1786 he unsuccessfully "endeavored to form an association of the powers subject to habitual depredation from them. I accordingly prepared, and proposed to their ministers at Paris, for consultation with their governments, articles of a special confederation." Jefferson argued that "The object of the convention shall be to compel the piratical States to perpetual peace." Jefferson prepared a detailed plan for the interested states. "Portugal, Naples, the two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, Denmark and Sweden were favorably disposed to such an association," Jefferson remembered, but there were "apprehensions" that England and France would follow their own paths, "and so it fell through."

Paying the ransom would only lead to further demands, Jefferson argued in letters to future presidents John Adams, then America's minister to Great Britain, and James Monroe, then a member of Congress. As Jefferson wrote to Adams in a July 11, 1786, letter, "I acknolege [sic] I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro' the medium of war." Paying tribute will merely invite more demands, and even if a coalition proves workable, the only solution is a strong navy that can reach the pirates, Jefferson argued in an August 18, 1786, letter to James Monroe: "The states must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them. . . . Every national citizen must wish to see an effective instrument of coercion, and should fear to see it on any other element than the water. A naval force can never endanger our liberties, nor occasion bloodshed; a land force would do both." "From what I learn from the temper of my countrymen and their tenaciousness of their money," Jefferson added in a December 26, 1786, letter to the president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, "it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them."

Jefferson's plan for an international coalition foundered on the shoals of indifference and a belief that it was cheaper to pay the tribute than fight a war. The United States's relations with the Barbary states continued to revolve around negotiations for ransom of American ships and sailors and the payment of annual tributes or gifts. Even though Secretary of State Jefferson declared to Thomas Barclay, American consul to Morocco, in a May 13, 1791, letter of instructions for a new treaty with Morocco that it is "lastly our determination to prefer war in all cases to tribute under any form, and to any people whatever," the United States continued to negotiate for cash settlements. In 1795 alone the United States was forced to pay nearly a million dollars in cash, naval stores, and a frigate to ransom 115 sailors from the dey of Algiers. Annual gifts were settled by treaty on Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli.

When Jefferson became president in 1801 he refused to accede to Tripoli's demands for an immediate payment of $225,000 and an annual payment of $25,000. The pasha of Tripoli then declared war on the United States. Although as secretary of state and vice president he had opposed developing an American navy capable of anything more than coastal defense, President Jefferson dispatched a squadron of naval vessels to the Mediterranean. As he declared in his first annual message to Congress: "To this state of general peace with which we have been blessed, one only exception exists. Tripoli, the least considerable of the Barbary States, had come forward with demands unfounded either in right or in compact, and had permitted itself to denounce war, on our failure to comply before a given day. The style of the demand admitted but one answer. I sent a small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean. . . ."

The American show of force quickly awed Tunis and Algiers into breaking their alliance with Tripoli. The humiliating loss of the frigate Philadelphia and the capture of her captain and crew in Tripoli in 1803, criticism from his political opponents, and even opposition within his own cabinet did not deter Jefferson from his chosen course during four years of war. The aggressive action of Commodore Edward Preble (1803-4) forced Morocco out of the fight and his five bombardments of Tripoli restored some order to the Mediterranean. However, it was not until 1805, when an American fleet under Commodore John Rogers and a land force raised by an American naval agent to the Barbary powers, Captain William Eaton, threatened to capture Tripoli and install the brother of Tripoli's pasha on the throne, that a treaty brought an end to the hostilities. Negotiated by Tobias Lear, former secretary to President Washington and now consul general in Algiers, the treaty of 1805 still required the United States to pay a ransom of $60,000 for each of the sailors held by the dey of Algiers, and so it went without Senatorial consent until April 1806. Nevertheless, Jefferson was able to report in his sixth annual message to Congress in December 1806 that in addition to the successful completion of the Lewis and Clark expedition, "The states on the coast of Barbary seem generally disposed at present to respect our peace and friendship."

One of the sad thing about modern-day Jeffersonians is that they prefer to read his works with an air towards scholarship, rather than his actions with an eye towards statesmanship. The two are not at odds, and Jefferson clearly put forward which side the US would take when threatened by those seeking to be appeased: their demands would never stop and would always increase, so it was better to have war *now* and *cheaper* to do so.

So it comes as a bit of surprise to find just how far those that support liberty and rights have wandered when plain spoken truth is applied (Source: ABC News blog) (h/t: AoSHQ):

In a statement, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., shot across the bow: "It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 6Oth anniversary of Israel's independence to launch a false political attack. It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel. Instead of tough talk and no action, we need to do what Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan did and use all elements of American power -- including tough, principled, and direct diplomacy - to pressure countries like Iran and Syria. George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the President's extraordinary politicization of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel."

ABC News' White House troops point out that the President has made similar statements in the past and Bush did not specifically cite Obama by name, though he did reference Sen. William Borah's immortal reaction upon hearing that Hitler had invaded Poland and begun World War II, something he has not highlighted in the past.

"(The President) has said similar things before," a White House official told ABC News' Martha Raddatz. "But it is in reference to a number of people, think Carter, others who have engaged in this or suggested it."

And folks like in the ISG Congressionally Mandated CYA group, above. Even more interesting is that Barack Obama's (Source: Allahpundit at Hot Air) doesn't put any pressure or preconditions on talking with Iran and Syria so that 'everything' is on the table as he said in the YouTube debate, just like the Sudetenland was 'open for discussion' with Germany... and then waffles from that on his website. Apparently there is 'nuance' in the air! Perhaps he will only give Lebanon away to appease the tyrants of Iran and Syria. If you are all hope and/or change and you take a tough, principled stand on NO preconditions, then what is it when you shift to something different later?

Are there any principles there at all?

Or will they change in the next few minutes to suit some other group?

And if you are going to 'change', then why not just say you want the EXACT SAME THING the other candidates want and take down the lovely non-difference from your website and say "I'm just like the others in the race"?

Principles guide policy, not the other way around and that is exactly what Sen. Obama is standing for: no principles and 'flexible' policy without them.

You know, it is always cheaper to pay off the bullies and tyrants *now*... and they will always ask for *more* until you finally realize the wisdom of President Jefferson: if the 'military option' is not on the table, then you are just negotiating the sales price of your liberty and those of others. That is not 'saber rattling' but good, cold, hard sense when dealing with those seeking to extort you for everything they want be it cash or national sovereignty. And the US has been far, far, far more tolerant of Iran and Syria than Jefferson was with the Barbary Pirates.

But then, he knew the cost of liberty and freedom which meted out in blood, not cash.

Same old hope and change

When reading about Sen. Obama's 'hope and change' message with regards to foreign policy, one comes across the distinct impression that his views are not all that out of line with the policies that previous Presidents have promulgated to ill ends. Consider his view on what is necessary to 'stabilize' Iraq, as seen from an NPR interview of 13 OCT 2007:

But the most important thing that we have to do is initiate the kind of diplomacy that is going to stabilize the situation. And there, Sen. Clinton and I do appear to have a difference, although it's hard to tell. I suggested that we should talk to our enemies and not just our friends, including Iran, including Syria. I got in an argument with Sen. Clinton back in the summer about this, because she suggested that that approach of negotiating without preconditions could be used for propaganda purposes and would be naive.

That is not a new view nor one of great profundity, as it pre-supposes that we have actually stopped talking with Iran and Syria. Sen. Obama becomes naive when he puts forth that we have stopped doing so. On the Syrian front you would, indeed, co-sponsor a bill with Sen. Frist (S.RES.534 passed by voice unanimous consent on18 JUL 2006 [Thomas link may be temporary]) entitled: A resolution condemning Hezbollah and Hamas and their state sponsors and supporting Israel's exercise of its right to self-defense. In the text of that bill that YOU Sen. Obama co-sponsored WITH a Republican it is affirmed the following:

Whereas Israel fully complied with United Nations Security Council Resolution 425 (adopted March 19, 1978) by completely withdrawing its forces from Lebanon, as certified by the United Nations Security Council and affirmed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on June 16, 2000, when he said, `Israel has withdrawn from [Lebanon] in full compliance with Security Council Resolution 425.';

Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 (adopted September 2, 2004) calls for the complete withdrawal of all foreign forces and the dismantlement of all independent militias in Lebanon;

Whereas despite Resolution 1559, the terrorist organization Hezbollah remains active in Lebanon and has amassed thousands of rockets aimed at northern Israel;

Whereas the Government of Lebanon, which includes representatives of Hezbollah, has done little to dismantle Hezbollah forces or to exert its authority and control throughout all geographic regions of Lebanon;

Whereas Hezbollah receives financial, military, and political support from Syria and Iran;

Whereas the United States has enacted several laws, including the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 (22 U.S.C. 2151 note) and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 (50 U.S.C. 1701 note), that call for the imposition of sanctions on Syria and Iran for, among other things, their support for terrorism and terrorist organizations;

You, yourself, back telling our enemies to stop funding terrorism, and, as President, you would be bound to enforce the Sanctions asked for by Congress. And President Bush *affirms* that he abides by and supports these actions by Congress and will carry them out (White House 07 MAY 2008). The National Security Advisor Steve Hadley took questions regarding the Syrian nuclear reactor and the US response, and got this question ( 06 AUG 2006 ):

Q Steve, is the administration now going to talk to Iran and Syria to make this point, and try to have some back-and-forth with them? As you know, many of your critics say you haven't been talking to your enemies, who actually hold the key to this.

MR. HADLEY: Well, in some sense, you know, every time someone like me gets up and talks and says what they've just said, we've sent a message to Syria and Iran. I mean, it's not as if they don't hear what has been said.

Secondly, in terms of both of these countries, there are a number of countries that are sending the same message. That's really been an approach we have had both with respect to Syria and Iran, to try and get the international community and as many countries as we can sending the same message to Syria and Iran.

In terms of Iran, as you know, we are very anxious to enter into a discussion with Iran on their nuclear program. And we have proposed to do so if they will simply do what the international community, what the Europeans, who have been handling the diplomacy with them have called for, what the IAEA Board of Governors have called for, which is to suspend their nuclear enrichment programs.

So we would like very much to be entering into a discussion with Iran on that issue and potentially other issues. But they've got to take a step to show that they are willing to come into compliance with the international community.

Sen. Obama, are you favoring a 'unilateralist' approach or 'cowboy' diplomacy where 'America goes it alone'? Because that is the *exact same* set of charges put against the current Administration with regard to Afghanistan and Iraq, and considering all the allies that we have supporting us in BOTH endeavors, that really is a slight to those who 'look up to the US'. Why are *you* willing to turn your back on the 'international community'?

But don't you worry, those 'Iranian Moderate Clerics' will surely come to your aid just like they did with President Clinton!

Now it is time for the retro-rewind!

The then newly elected President Khatami, on 14 DEC 1997, told us that he would, indeed, seek better relations with the US (via GlobalSecurity.org VOA archives):

PRESIDENT KHATAMI TOLD A NEWS CONFERENCE SUNDAY IN TEHERAN HE WANTS TO HAVE A TALK SOON WITH THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, BUT HE DID NOT SAY WHAT FORM THAT DIALOGUE WOULD TAKE. HE IMPLIED SUCH A DIALOGUE WOULD INCLUDE THE U-S GOVERNMENT, THOUGH HE ACCUSED U-S POLITICIANS OF HAVING FALLEN BEHIND THE TIMES. HE SAID IN A RAPIDLY CHANGING WORLD THAT HAS BECOME MULTI-POLAR, THE UNITED STATES STILL IMAGINES IT IS THE SOLE POWER AND IT MUST IMPOSE ITS POWER ON THE WORLD AT ANY COST. MR. KHATAMI IS A MODERATE SHITTE MUSLIM WHO WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT LAST MAY. SINCE THEN HE HAS SOFTENED RELATIONS WITH OTHER ARAB NATIONS, INCLUDING PRO-WESTERN SAUDI ARABIA.

Why a man after your own heart,no? Just the sort of man you want to support, isn't it? Unfortunately he didn't really seem to understand what was going on as he continued just a bit further in his press conference:

HE TOLD REPORTERS (SUNDAY) INSTEAD OF SPEAKING TO EACH OTHER WITH THE LANGUAGE OF FORCE, WE SHOULD LEARN TO SPEAK WITH THE LANGUAGE OF REASON.

MR. KHATAMI ALSO DISMISSED EFFORTS TO ESTABLISH PEACE WITH ISRAEL, WHICH HE DESCRIBED AS -- RACIST AND EXPANSIONIST. HE SAID ARAB COUNTRIES THAT HAD TRIED POLITICAL DIALOGUE WITH ISRAEL HAD GAINED NOTHING.

THE UNITED STATES SEVERED TIES WITH IRAN IN 1979 AFTER ISLAMIC MILITANTS STORMED THE U-S EMBASSY IN TEHERAN AND TOOK 52 AMERICANS HOSTAGE FOR MORE THAN A YEAR. THE UNITED STATES HAS TRIED TO OSTRACIZE IRAN AND HAS CALLED IT A TOP SPONSOR OF TERRORISM.

Say, would you say, Sen. Obama, that Egypt and Jordan, having made *peace* with Israel have gained nothing? Remember, now, that Khatami was a 'moderate' and President Clinton would try dropping some minor trade sanctions to see if they were reciprocated and Iran would start to recognize its duties not to destabilize other Nations. Doesn't look like they got the message, did they? Taking a look at the press briefing by James P. Rubin at the State Dept on 03 DEC 1999 (via GlobalSecurity.org document cache), we get to see what sort of response the US got and how the US utilizes its various channels to keep in contact with the Iranian regime:

US aim is to have official dialogue about issues of concern, including support for terrorism. US has not received hoped-for responses, on terrorism cooperation or on visas for Iranians to come to the US.

[..]

QUESTION: On the subject of terrorism in Saudi Arabia, could you tell us about the attempts by the United States to get Iranian support and help in uncovering who blew up Khobar Towers?

MR. RUBIN: Let me say in that regard, I think it should be understood that our objective here with Iran to have a dialogue is not have a dialogue for dialogue's sake; it's to have a dialogue so that we can engage in a process by which Iranian policies of concern would change, including our concern about Iranian support for terrorist organizations and those who are enemies of the peace process.

We have made clear that the policies changing is the objective. We have not received in our dialogue through - let me rewind that tape. We have had contacts, diplomatic contact, messages, to Iran. There is no secret about that. We don't have the kind of direct dialogue that we have been seeking in order to change those policies of concern.

We have not received from Iran, the government of Iran, the kind of responses that we have been hoping for on a wide range of issues, including on the cooperation we seek in investigating acts of terrorism. That is unfortunate and, generally speaking, the Iranian Government's response to our efforts in that area and also our efforts to try to make it easier for visas to be provided to Iranian Americans or Iranians who want to come to America, we've sought visits that would facilitate that process that many people in Iran want, which is to have an ability to come to the United States.

So on those two issues, cooperation on terrorism and making it easier for visas to be provided for Iranians visiting the United States, the Iranian Government's response has tended to be hide-bound and unimaginative.

So that is the state of play. We still believe that it is in our interest to have a dialogue in which our concerns, primarily terrorism and active opposition to the Middle East peace process can be pursued, but it's a fundamental misunderstanding if there is an impression that we're seeking a dialogue for dialogue's sake.

A few points for the good Sen. Obama to ponder: does he want 'dialogue for the sake of dialogue'? That *is* what that 'hope and change' view has as its basis with a 'fresh face' showing up to hold dialogue with Iran. Even the CLINTONS understood that was not productive with the regime in Tehran. They utilized something known as 'back channel discussions' to remain in contact with the regime via other means. Also note that the Clinton Administration was doing both the 'high' end approach on 'hardball' with terrorist issues and the 'softball' approach with regards to getting Iranian individuals visas to come and visit the US. Both of them *failed*. And who failed them? Was it the Clinton Administration for lack of seeking 'dialogue'?

No.

It was in the hands of Iran and they spoke very nicely of opening up 'dialogue' but the pre-condition of condemning Israel and getting the US to stop supporting Israel meant that it was *not* an offer made on 'reason'.

Now, about that 'stability in the Middle East' part that Sen. Obama seeks to achieve with Iran, during that exact, same press conference the Clinton Administration gave its view on just that topic... again, this is 1999:

QUESTION: Just to go back to Iran for a moment, it seems that you've often described the potential US relationship with Iran in sort of addressing the negatives - support for terrorism, opposition to the Middle East peace process - and I wonder if you have any thought about what value, what positive value, the US might have in relations with Iran?

MR. RUBIN: We believe Iran is an important country. It is located in a very important area. Our two peoples have a long and friendly history prior to the most recent developments in the late '70s and throughout the '80s, and we believe that Iran is located in a part of the world that's important to us.

We believe that the people of Iran would benefit from increasing interaction with the people of the United States. We believe the people of the United States would benefit from the interaction of the long and proud culture of Persia and Iran, and there is much to be gained on both sides, but we do have problems. Those problems are real. Some of them have even increased recently, and I've spoken to that.

So pending a decision by the government of Iran to move to address those issues in a direct dialogue, we believe it's appropriate to facilitate and promote a dialogue of the peoples of the United States and Iran in an analogous way to that proposed by President Khatami of a dialogue of civilizations. We welcome that. We support that. We want that to go forward. We think it brings great benefit to both of our peoples.

We think a relationship that could overcome major problems if we could get Iran to stop supporting the opponents of the Middle East peace process, we think that it would make the Middle East a much more stable place, and that would be good for everybody. We think that if we could make progress on stopping Iran's support for those groups that engage in terrorist activities, that would make the world a safer place, and that would be very important.

Beyond that, the potential for a more normal relationship was put out there and put forward by Secretary Albright in a speech in New York - I think it was a year and a half ago - but it's very hard to discuss the fruits of that normal relationship at a time when we can't even get Iran to see the wisdom in talking about the problems that we think exist.

Yes, even the Clinton Administration couldn't get Khatami or Iran to see the light of 'reason'. They, instead, put forward the 'cultural' approach and were rebuffed on that, too. Apparently no one has ignored the Iranian People, save their very own government, which is the problem there. Considering that Sen. Obama should *know* all of this, then why is it that he puts such stock on 'dialogue' when one partner refuses to show up in the *least* ways? Also, there wasn't a US presence in Iraq, then, so the destabilizing of the Middle East by the Iranian regime pre-dates that by quite a lot.

Now it is time for the retro-rewind by going back to the *previous* Administration, that of Bush-41 and getting his view on Iran from a 25 MAY 1990 interview excerpt (via GlobalSecurity.org archives) he did with French television:

Q: What would you fear most today, Mr. President, communism or the growing of Muslim fundamentalism?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I haven't thought about that in terms of priorities. Communism is on the wane, it's on the way out. In our hemisphere, there's only one left, and that's Castro. And I don't know what he believes because he -- but he darn sure can't be excited about the way things are going for good, old communists; going down the drain. And so -- and I think when you see people have a free choice, nobody's speaking up, hey, I want to have a communist government. It just isn't happening. And so I don't fear communism at all.

I don't like that ideology and so I worry about that. But in terms of Muslim fundamentalism, the real extremes there, I am concerned about that. We lived through a terrible time in Iran. We still have difficulties there. But I'm hopeful some day we can have better relations. Because I think Mr. Rafsanjani is showing a sense of reasonableness in some areas that perhaps his predecessor didn't feel he could show, or didn't feel like showing.

So I worry about this problem.

Yes, Rafsanjani would be yet another 'moderate' in Iran that would lead to NO changes in its stance. But President Bush did have 'hope and change' on his mind, make no mistake about it! But that hope about change would prove very short lived as a press release of 19 JUL 1990 by Congressmen would show (Source: GlobalSecurity.org archives):

Washington, D.C. -- Congressman Mervyn M. Dymally, (D- Compton, CA) announced that he and 161 of his colleagues have written to the president of Iran's National Council of Resistance, Mr. Massoud Rajavi, extending their "profound sympathies" to him about the assassination of his brother, Dr. Kazem Rajavi, noting that they share his view that "decisiveness is required to confront Tehran's medieval dictatorship."

The 162 Representatives cited the Tehran-sponsored terrorist assassination on April 24, 1990, of Dr. Kazem Rajavi, whom they called "a great advocate of human rights, who had dedicated his life to the establishment of democracy in his homeland." The Congressmen expressed their support for the democratic resistance in Iran saying, "We ask you, as the Leader of the Iranian Resistance, to assure your countrymen that we support their peaceful and democratic aims."

The letter signed by 100 Democrats and 62 Republicans, says that "Dr. Rajavi's assassination is but-more proof of Tehran's continuing insistence to use terrorism as the principal and indispensable pillar of its foreign policy," and emphasizes that the Representatives share Mr. Rajavi's view that "any negligence or flexibility vis-a-vis the crimes of this regime only encourages it to export terrorism."

"One year after the death of Khomeini, the Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani has proven that he is as immoderate as Khomeini, by continuing the repressive and terrorist policies of his mentor," said Congressman Dymally.

"The internal oppression also has continued despite the visit to Tehran by the United Nations' Special Representative," Reynaldo Galindo Pohl stated the letter. Congressman Dymally described Galindo Pohl's report, as "whitewash and a disgrace for the United Nations" and considered it "a green light" to the Iran regime to carry out such crimes as the one in Geneva.

On June 22, 1990, the Swiss Police issued a report saying that Iranian government agencies had directly planned and carried out the murder of Dr. Kazem Rajavi. The report stated that the assassination team carried Iranian government service passports -- "all issued on the same date" -- and flew between Tehran and Geneva on Iran Air.

Tehran felt that reaching out and assassinating supporters overseas was a good idea, and Dr. Rajavi was neither the first nor the last to be killed for the regime's goals. And do note the 'helpfulness' of the 'international community', here! Apparently use of terrorism to destabilize the region and enforce its clerical view extends far beyond the borders of Iran, Sen. Obama. The 'hope & change' has been seen many times before in Iran and we have yet to see a damned thing result from hoped for change. Instead we get assassinations, attacks on sovereign States and destabilization with a goal of spreading Iranian influence and power.

The Clinton Administration tried to use *that* to its advantage, believe it or not! The place that it tried that was Bosnia, and I took a pretty long, hard look at that failed policy awhile back. From that lets take a look at a DEMOCRAT who criticized it when Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) asked the State Dept. for its views and got them in a letter from Barbara Larkin, Acting Assistant Secretary, Legislative Affairs dated 20 MAY 1996, which he had put into the Congressional Record: June 11, 1996 (Extensions), DOCID:cr11jn96-22, THIRD-COUNTRY ARMS DELIVERIES TO BOSNIA AND CROATIA, an excerpt follows:

The political and military dynamic in Bosnia changed in March 1994. In that month, as a result of active U.S. mediation by our Special Envoy, Ambassador Charles Redman, the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, and the Bosnian Croat community signed agreements ending their military conflict and setting up a bi-communal Federation between Bonsia's Muslims and ethnic Croats. The newly born Federation immediately received strong U.S. diplomatic support, and deservedly so; its founding principles reflected pluralistic Western values and the cease-fire it engendered helped free up government forces to defend their country against the Serbs and, over time, altered the military balance.

When President Tudjman of Croatia approached Ambassador Galbraith in Zagreb in April 1994 to elicit U.S. views on allowing third-country arms shipments to Bosnia via Croatia, we determined that a negative response could have led to the collapse of the Federation and a new deterioration of the Bosnian Government's military position. Instead, we decided that the best course was neither to object to nor approve of arms transfers to Bosnia through Croatia. This was consistent with our practice in the preceding months not to take active steps to prevent third-country arms shipments. At the same time, we did not believe it would have been appropriate to endorse actions contrary to UN Security Council resolutions. Thus we told Ambassador Galbraith to state that he had "no instructions" on the matter.

Our decision eventually bore fruit. By sustaining the Federation and eroding the Serbs' military advantage, it paved the way for the American diplomacy, backed by NATO air power, that produced the peace agreement at Dayton. Our decision allowed us both to observe our legal obligations under UN Security Council Resolution 713 and to promote the achievement of peace.

How did the Administration assess the implications of such a policy change on international adherence to UN Security Council Resolution 713 and U.S. efforts to get friends and allies to stop trade, economic dealings, and investment ties with Iran?

Iran's entry into the Bosnian conflict occurred long before the April 1994 decision. Iranian efforts to gain influence in Bosnia date back to the 1980s. They gained momentum in 1991-92, in the early stages of the war, when the international community proved unable to confront Serb aggression. During this period, despite the UN arms embargo, Iran established itself as Bosnia's principal arms supplier and dispatched hundreds of Revolutionary Guard and other personnel to assist in training Bosnian Government forces. Iranian military aid was part of a multi-pronged campaign of support that also included intelligence cooperation along with economic and humanitarian assistance. We have no evidence that Iran's presence in Bosnia increased significantly after April 1994. It is also worth noting that, through the Dayton Accords and subsequent diplomacy, we have reduced Iranian military influence in Bosnia to its lowest levels in years.

The April 1994 decision had no discernable impact on U.S. efforts to gain international support for the use of economic pressure to alter Iran's objectionable behavior, including its support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Prior to 1994, our Allies had generally been unresponsive to our requests that they not provide Iran with economic benefits such as new official credits and loan guarantees. In the past year, however, following the President's decision to impose a trade and investment embargo against Iran, most European countries have substantially reduced the pace and volume of economic activity with Iran. We continue to urge European governments to join our efforts to pressure Iran economically. Based on our ongoing consultations, including the April 19 meeting in Rome of the U.S.-EU-Canada Working Group on Iran, we have concluded that the April 1994 decision has not significantly affected our Iran diplomacy.

Did the United States have discussions regarding these deliveries only with the Croatian and Bosnian authorities, or did the United States also have discussions directly with third countries supplying or financing these arms deliveries?

The United States had no communications with Iran regarding arms for Bosnia, nor are we aware of any occasion on which U.S. officials, in any discussions with other countries, requested them to transfer arms to Bosnia or Croatia.

What countries besides Iran were involved in the financing and delivery of arms to Bosnia? Were Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt involved?

We have provided classified documents which address this question to the Senate Intelligence Committee and we will provide these same materials to appropriate Congressional committees that request them.

If there was a change of policy, why was there a change of policy, and who was informed of it? Was Congress informed, were Allies informed, and were all appropriate officials of the United States informed about a change in policy that affected stated, public policy? If not, why not?

In order to succeed, the thrust of our diplomatic activity both before and after April 1994--adhering to our obligations under UN resolutions, maintaining the cohesion of the Western Alliance, while not taking action to prevent the Bosnians from receiving weapons--required great discretion. That is why the Administration kept the April 1994 discussions with the Croatian government closely held within its own ranks.

It should be noted, however, that the Congressional leadership and relevant committees were made aware of the existence of Iranian arms shipments both from Administration-provided intelligence briefings and press reports. Furthermore, the U.S. decision not to object to such shipments was not inconsistent with the will of Congress as expressed in a June 1994 vote in the House of Representatives to lift the arms embargo unilaterally. In October 1994, the full Congress voted to cut off funds for U.S. enforcement of the arms embargo. No exception for Iranian arms was contained in the legislation, nor was any such exception proposed during the debate.

There you have a lovely 'change' in reading of Congressional language in the 'hope' things would work out well. Don't mind the civil war that followed. Mind you the 'hope' was that if we gave Iran some free-play in Bosnia it would 'change' its attitude towards the US and give us some 'Arab street cred'. It did neither of those things. So we now have the following Administrations looking to 'hope & change' and not getting it: Bush (41), Clinton, Bush (43).

It's retro-rewind time!

Now, as Sen. Obama put President Reagan up as a modicum of how a leader for 'hope & change' can act, lets take a look at HIM with regards to Iran. And if you are a Democrat you will try to play this up while playing down Clinton, but that no longer washes... what we are seeing is something else that I talked about, which is 'Realism in Foreign Policy' and how that made the world a worse place, not a better one. Part of the insanity that went on during the Reagan Administration involved the putative 'personal outreach' to Khomeini by Reagan, himself. What did he do? He sent Khomeini a CAKE! (Source: The story behind Reagan's dealings with the mullahs by George J. Church, Time Magazine, 17 NOV 1986) This was part of a much larger initiative that would become Iran/Contra and Arms for Hostages:

The tale sounded really too bizarre to be believed. The U.S. conniving at arms shipments to Iran? Sending a secret mission to palaver with the mullahs? Trying to keep the whole thing from Congress and most of the U.S. Government? And all over Iran, of all places! The country that held Americans hostage for 444 days beginning in 1979, the land whose fanatical leader, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, has never ceased to denounce America as the "Great Satan," the state widely suspected to this very day of fomenting terrorist attacks against Americans.

Yet there is no question that it happened. Initially in the perhaps illusory hope of gaining influence with a post-Khomeini government in Iran, but eventually also as an inducement for Iranian help in winning freedom for U.S. hostages held by Muslim zealots in Lebanon, the Reagan Administration approved clandestine shipments of military equipment -- ammunition, spare parts for tanks and jet fighters -- to Iran through Israel.

As long as the deep secret was kept -- even from most of the U.S. intelligence community -- the maneuver in one sense worked. Iran apparently leaned on Lebanese terrorists to set free three American hostages, the latest of whom, David Jacobsen, flew home to the U.S. last week for a Rose Garden meeting with Ronald Reagan. But once the broad outlines of the incredible story became known, the consequences were dire. The Administration appeared to have violated at least the spirit, and possibly the letter, of a long succession of U.S. laws that are intended to stop any arms transfers, direct ( or indirect, to Iran. Washington looked to be sabotaging its own efforts to organize a worldwide embargo against arms sales to Iran, and hypocritically flouting its incessant admonitions to friends and allies not to negotiate with terrorists for the release of their captives.

Now isn't that right up the 'hope & change' alley?

The entire 'neat idea' brain fart by North/Hakim/Secord would put one of the most dangerous representatives of one of the oldest drug dealing families from Syria right in the laps of the 'emerging market' for illegal narcotics and terrorism in South America: Monzer al-Kassar. To refresh the memories of those who are willing to forget this problem during the Reagan Administration, let me pull up a bit from Chapter 8 of the Walsh Report on Iran/Contra:

Phases V-VII of the Contra Arms Sales (March-June 1986)

Between February 27 and May 23, 1986, the Enterprise paid Defex Portugal about $860,000 for contra weapons. Weapons were delivered to Central America in March, April and May in three shipments. CSF books show profit distributions between April and June, numbered Phases V through VII, totaling $550,471. In addition, there was an unnumbered distribution of $37,277 on June 20, 1986, resulting from the Phase VII shipment.
The Undelivered Shipment and Distribution (July-September 1986)

In July 1986, the Enterprise paid Defex (Portugal) $2.6 million and $500,000 to another dealer, Monzer Al Kassar, for contra weapons. In late July, a shipment of arms left Portugal for Central America aboard the recently acquired Enterprise freighter, the Erria.8 According to Thomas Parlow, the Erria's Danish shipping agent, the freighter was carrying arms picked up in Poland and Portugal.9

8 Clines, Hakim and William Haskell, an associate of North, traveled to Copenhagen in April 1986 to purchase for approximately $320,000 the Erria, which the Enterprise had leased a year earlier for a weapons shipment to the contras. The ship was purchased by the Enterprise in the name of Dolmy Business Inc., a Panamanian shell company. Thomas Parlow became the Erria's Danish shipping agent. According to Parlow, Hakim would telephone Parlow to direct movement of the ship, and Parlow would communicate those directions to the ship's captain. (Parlow, FBI 302, 3/5/87, pp. 2-3.)

9 Ibid., p. 3.

As the Erria was nearing Bermuda, Parlow, acting on instructions from Hakim, ordered it to slow its speed and await further instructions. Clines then directed the ship to work its way slowly back to Portugal.10 When it arrived in Portugal it could not obtain permission to enter the port. In this mid- to late-August 1986 period, Secord ordered Clines to try to sell the cargo or dump it at sea, according to Parlow. The vessel headed for Spain, where it remained anchored for two weeks.

10 The ship apparently was ordered back to Europe because it was to be used in an impending U.S.-Israeli venture involving Iran.

As the Erria made its circuitous journey, the CIA through a series of commercial entities arranged to buy the weapons aboard. According to CIA officials, they did not learn the identity of either the owner of the ship or its cargo until January 1987, when a newspaper article named the Secord-Hakim Enterprise as the owner of the ship and the weapons.

The CIA paid $2.1 million for the arms shipment, including shipping and handling costs.11 According to the private arms dealer who bought the arms for the CIA, he paid $1.6 million for the weapons. Of that, the Enterprise received $1.2 million, and the remainder went to Parlow or Defex, who worked together to re-sell the weapons.

Yes, the money amounts aren't all that much in the arms business, but the *contacts* necessary to swing that entire shipment and keep contacts open with Iran puts Monzer al-Kassar in close proximity to the up and coming Carlos Menem and they would become intertwined in ways that we still cannot figure out, save for the trail of corpses behind them. That man would not only show up in Iran/Contra, but in the *other* big story coming up during that era and be cited as a player in the BCCI report:

4. BCCI's relationships with convicted Iraqi arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, Syrian drug trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer Al-Kassar, and other major arms dealers. Sarkenalian was a principal seller of arms to Iraq. Monzer Al-Kassar has been implicated in terrorist bombings in connection with terrorist organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Other arms dealers, including some who provided machine guns and trained Medellin cartel death squads, also used BCCI. Tracing their assets through the bank would likely lead to important information concerning international terrorist and arms trafficker networks.

5. The use of BCCI by central figures in arms sales to Iran during the 1980's. The late Cyrus Hashemi, a key figure in allegations concerning an alleged deal involving the return of U.S. hostages from Iran in 1980, banked at BCCI London. His records have been withheld from disclosure to the Subcommittee by a British judge. Their release might aid in reaching judgments concerning Hashemi's activities in 1980, with the CIA under President Carter and allegedly with William Casey.

6. BCCI's activities with the Central Bank of Syria and with the Foreign Trade Mission of the Soviet Union in London. BCCI was used by both the Syrian and Soviet governments in the period in which each was involved in supporting activities hostile to the United States. Obtaining the records of those financial transactions would be critical to understanding what the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov was doing in the West; and might document the nature and extent of Syria's support for international terrorism.

Yes, within the Top 5 of 'things that really need to be done' from that report! And do note his already existing ties to terrorist organizations elsewhere. The grand part of this is that Monzer al-Kassar is a SYRIAN. Beautiful, is it not? 'Hope & Change' applied to BOTH Iran and Syria via the Iran/Contra scandal? You can't get much more 'hope & change'-ful than trying to negotiate arms shipments for hostage releases via organized crime that supports narcotics trafficking and terrorism on a global scale. You could probably find out how Saddam felt about that, being that there was the Iran-Iraq war going on at the time, from your friend and cousin Saddam Hussein, Nadhmi Auchi. Really with Auchi's connections in organized crime, money laundering and terrorism, you can start a whole new style of 'hope & change' and bypass some of the intermediaries that would plague the Reagan Administration: might as well start out with corruption at the top, no?

And none of this *dealing* would help when the US went in to try and 'stabilize' a small part of the Middle East known as Lebanon. Sen. Obama has, apparently, forgotten that the last time the US made a big, bold and limited venture with the French to help put a lid on things and get Iran and Syria to the 'stabilization' concept, we would end up with our Beirut Embassy being bombed, our Marine Barracks being bombed along with the French camp, and then, after we had skedaddled leaving American blood in Lebanon, our Embassy was bombed *again* in a 'stay out and we mean it' sort of affair. It was their lovely child called Hezbollah under the guidance of Imad Mugniyah who accomplished that, and would later team up with al-Kassar in Argentina for some slaughter there, too. Thank heavens that beast is finally dead, not that we did anything to get him, mind you.

Speaking of which, the reason al-Kassar was going to Argentina, beyond opening up a heroin for cocaine swap between criminal enterprises, and flooding Europe with cocaine, was to get advanced missile technology and a nuclear reactor from Menem. Took a bit of nudging from the US to nix that, but we wound up with some of the worse expansion of organized crime, narcotics organizations, money laundering, arms dealing and terrorism the world had ever seen. One man really can make a difference!

Now its time to do the retro-rewind again!

Why, damn, we are back at the guy who helped to *cause* all these problems, President Jimmy Carter. I have traced this back before, but we might as well start at where 'hope & change' started: with laxness and malaise. But before *that* lets look at some of the folks advising Sen. Obama and the rest of the candidates at that time on foreign policy. You see one of the problems in the 'hope & change' category is the maladroitness of one of your advisors, Zbigniew Brzezinski. In an article from Policy Review at the Hoover Institution, we have Mark Bowden reviewing a book put out by Atlantic Monthly Press ( DEC 2006-JAN 2007 Policy Review) we get to see just how Mr. ZB looked at Iran, and you just might want to think a moment about a man who wanted to back the Shah of Iran 'to the hilt' and guaranteed that, while Secretary of State Cyrus Vance wanted to come to terms with Iran. That was all part of the series of events that led to the first US Embassy break-in in Iran ( FEB 1979) and the second break-in and hostage taking on 04 NOV 1979. Mr. ZB would want to back the Shah 'to the hilt' unless Iran was willing to come over to the US side of the Cold War, in which case he was more than ready to dump the Shah. When Henry Kissinger and Nelson Rockefeller were able to persuade the Carter Administration to take in the ailing Shah, *then* we got the hostage taking. In other words, the Carter Administration was dealing different cards with Mr. ZB and Cyrus Vance, each of whom assumed that Iran was going to be a 'rational state actor' just like all the other Nations on the planet. But Khomeini had his own 'hope & change' that wanted nothing to do with 'Great Power Politics' and was all for overthrowing absolutely everything in the aim of getting a Global Islamic State.

Apparently Mr. ZB couldn't grasp that and tried to appease Iran by putting forward a 'Green Belt' of Islamic States between the US and USSR. He was hoping that Iran would form up a league of 'moderate muslim' states to confront the USSR! Of course Iraq, France and a few other countries had told us just how radical Khomeini *was* and that his idea of a 'Green Belt' was a one-way, Caliphate-only affair. Somewhere near the end of his term, President Carter finally had the dawning light appear to him, in the form of an election not going so well for him, that he was being dealt with in bad faith by Iran and that they were playing *political games* to wound his Administration and get him out of power. His response to all of this was to sit in the Rose Garden, go 'tut-tut' and do very little. Of course he did try a rescue attempt, but since the US Armed Forces still had not rebuilt nor recovered morale since Vietnam, that operation was an advanced CF of the worst kind.

Say, what was that about you wanting to cut advanced weapons systems and training, Sen. Obama? Sound like the Jimmy Carter prescription for disaster to me...

But then I was in the US during that part of the Cold War. I didn't get to be a Kansan-Hawaiin that would spend time in Indonesia and lead a cushioned life insulated from the concept that a sudden nuclear decision in the Kremlin would give me a permanent bad hair day that was terminal. Nor did I get to go through an Ivy League school to rack up tons of debt nor a lovely multi-hundreds of thousands a year job with which to pay it off, all the time garnering lofty ideas of racial separation and how bad the US was and that we deserved everything we got. The feeling with Carter was, at least from my neck of the woods, that he should do something to storm in there and get our people freed just as was done during the Spanish Civil War and other times when US Citizens in government employment overseas were taken hostage by hostiles. I was utterly appalled by President Reagan actually *dealing* with such barbaric characters, and seeking to pay them off, which is something the US has assiduously tried to avoid since President Jefferson not wanting to spend one cent for tribute but millions for defense of our citizens. When those practicing Private War upon the high seas endangered US commerce, President Jackson sent the first US vessel to circumnavigate the planet: the frigate USS Potomac.

When we *stopped* defending our citizens who had joined our government on the CIVIL SIDE or who were engaged in normal commerce and fully protected under the Law of Nations from unjust attacks, then things started to go very, very wrong.

But then you wouldn't recognize that as justice, but 'imperialism' that standing up for your fellow citizen and ensuring he is safe from the depredation of those practicing Private War. No, you want to talk with those seeking to dismantle Nations so that they may rule the planet to their own petty desires. Apparently we have tried talking with them, beseeching with them to act in a civilized manner, to show any hint of understanding of reason and reciprocity amongst Nations. Some of your fellow Congresscrittes have been making regular pilgrimages to Syria, for years now, and we have no let-up in the Syrian stance on things. Here is what came of Congressman Rahall's trip:

Damascus, Syria -- The Middle East peace process "is a process that must succeed, and that is our position, that we want to see that process succeed," Congressman Nick J. Rahall (Democrat, West Virginia) said at an on-the-record press briefing here January 7.

Rahall, who is leading a congressional delegation to the Middle East that includes Representatives Dana Rohrabacher (Republican, California) and Maurice Hinchey (Democrat, New York), said "Our mission is to build upon the strong relationships we have with the Syrian people, both on a personal basis and the bilateral relationships that exist between the Syrian and the American government. We hope to use our dialogue while in the country to open up the peace process once again."

Noting that this was his first visit to the region, Congressman Rohrabacher said he believes the people of the region are "heartsick for peace" and that "there is an opportunity today to further the cause of peace and to come, at last, to an understanding among the parties here in the region that will lead to a lasting peace."

"There have been a number of examples recently of a ... new fresh wind blowing across this part of the world," Congressman Hinchey said. "There are opportunities to sweep away some of the mistakes of the past, particularly the last two decades. And we hope that this opportunity will be taken advantage of and that we can move forward in a more positive way, both my country, your country, the other countries of this region...."

That trip was in 1998. Notice the 'new fresh wind' and all of that? Lots of 'hope & change' there and everyone was ready to 'make nice' after a couple of decades of having Israel being attacked, the triple bombings in Beirut against the US... yes, lets just sweep that all under the rug now! As for the most recent trip let see what Rep. Joe Pitts had to say on this:

"Dialogue is not a sign of weakness," Pitts said after returning home Wednesday. "It's a sign of strength."

[..]

"The first thing we said was … to appeal to the Syrian government to stop the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq with (explosives) and killing our soldiers in Iraq," Pitts said. The Republicans also talked about stopping Syrian support of Hamas and Hezbollah and Syrian involvement in Lebanon, he said.

[..]

"He denied that there were terrorists that they knew about going through their country," Pitts said. "(The Syrians) said if you have evidence, give it to us, and we'll act on it.

"They were interested in diplomacy. They want respect. Basically, they feel we have talked down to them, and we don't treat them with civility and as an equal." (Thank you to the Lancaster Online for this 05 APR 2007 report!)

Why, Sen. Obama, aren't you stealing someone else's 'hope & change' ideas? All they want is a some respect and civility for breaking their agreements on WMD creation and proliferation of technology. A mere *nothing* to someone ready for all this 'hope & change' stuff, no?

The last man who went to talk to and appease a tyrant was Neville Chamberlain and our media lauded him as seen in this American Radio Account:

Now we know that Neville Chamberlain, who is a Realist and masterful man, has made up his mind that the time has come to give up attempts at ideal solutions to the European problems, such as through the League of Nations. To deal with facts, as he found them, and the two outstanding facts were the two dictators, Hitler and Moussolini. Both had grievances that had to be recognized and it's possible were right. Before Europe would turn over in bed and most dream comfortably. And Chamberlain told his Cabinet that he was going to settle this and on a Realist basis.

Ah, such a great idea giving up attempts at 'ideal solutions' and just working with dictators and tyrants who have grievances and giving them what they want. Half-a-loaf and all that! Of course you dare not isolate a tyrant and dictator... why, that is just something that is far too civilized to even consider, as Arthur Henderson points out:

But to cut off relations with an aggressor may often invite retaliation by armed action, and this would, in its turn, make necessary some form of collective self-defence by the loyal members of the League.

Yes, if you don't talk to dictators they just might get a bit irate and do something to you! Can't have that now, can we? Arthur Henderson died in 1935 before the outcomes of what that sort of mental attitude did to the world by the policies it created. Policies that sound something like this:

Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage them constructively. In seeking to influence the behavior of both countries, the United States has disincentives and incentives available. Iran should stem the flow of arms and training to Iraq, respect Iraq’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and use its influence over Iraqi Shia groups to encourage national reconciliation. The issue of Iran’s nuclear programs should continue to be dealt with by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany. Syria should control its border with Iraq to stem the flow of funding, insurgents, and terrorists in and out of Iraq.

Why, are you sure that Iran and Syria just haven't resorted to 'collective self-defense'? Wouldn't that be the lovely excuse to deploy about whey they feel so aggrieved in the world, Sen. Obama? That is, of course, from the Iraq Study Group report, page 7. Which was so enlightened and 'bi-partisan' that it recommends seeking to ask States that are exporting terrorism to destabilize a neighbor if they might, pretty please, think about not doing that? Unfortunately for the very high minded 'Realists' they cannot seem to deal with irrational leaders of Nations, which puts them in a bind when they run across same.

How about you, Sen. Obama? Just how do you deal with irrational world leaders that are in charge of Nations seeking to export terror, destruction and seek to dominate more and more of our globe? Because, somehow, as seeing the US as the *problem* in the world and wanting us to start disarming in the face of those seeking genocide and domination, I just don't see that attitude as coming to a good end. But that is history for you! Where the 'ideal solution' of wanting leaders of Nations to act in a responsible manner with other Nations just isn't 'Realistic'.

And not doing so is suicidal.