Maybe you could discuss their need to give up the ‘Death to the Infidels’ rhetoric.

Correct me if I’m wrong. Didn’t Obama critics say he wasn’t ready for primetime because he omitted to say that he would have preconditions to the talks to Iran. Obama never actually uttered the words “I will talk to Iran without any preconditions.”

And it’s not just Iran, Cuba was included. What is the logic that McCain McSame uses to lump Iran and Cuba together? What are the preconditions needed to talk to Cuba? We want the 90% ownership and control of the tourist industry back like before the Castro revolution.

To sivapith’s point, you’re right on. We do have to keep in mind that Ahmadinejad is not the supreme leader of Iran. For all we know his popularity is probably as low as our fearless leader in Bush. The only difference between Bush and Ahmadinejad is our congress failed to put in him in check. Ahmadinejad can say all he wants, but he doesn’t even have the support of his clergy and government to act, much less the Muslim world.

I suspect you answer your own conundrum here, fafaroo. They don’t care how any country’s population looks at us–they hunger for blood, war, and affirmation that their figurative phallus is big and hard. Bomb as desired, consider consequences, um, never.

This is so obvious as to go without saying. The fact that you missed the larger point of Iranian popular support for the US is, however, not surprising.

One of the reasons for talking to the Iranian leadership instead of threatening the country with bombings or worse, is that threatening them with bombs would tend to radicalize the Iranian population against the US. That’s a huge mistake if our larger goal is to promote democracy and freedom in the Middle East. We want to cultivate popular sentiment in the Iranian population, not discourage it.

We went apeshit over 9-11 for good reason. I will never understand how the same conservatives who hungered for blood after the WTC attacks also seem to think that bombing or invading another country, or threatening to do so, would actually endear that country’s population to us. It makes no sense.

But they do get to vote for their presidents, just like we do. Remember, Mohammad Khatami was president of Iran from 1997 to 2005, and he was very much the sort of reformer that the US could have worked with well (though I’ll grant that the clerics have the ultimate power and they are die-hard conservatives). But instead of trying to support Khatami, Bush labeled Iran as part of his “Axis of Evil”, which, I have to believe, led to Iran’s Average Joes electing a fiery (blustery?) nationalist in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Continuing our own bluster, let alone dropping bombs, is not going to convince the people of Iran to vote for pro-(or at least non anti-)American leaders. This is not a difficult concept to understand, which is why 67% of the country gets it.

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Not necessary. We were already funding Pol Pot (with our partners the dreaded Chinese) in their war against the Vietnamese.

i thought that consisted mainly of “Fuck you.”

Ahmedinajad rattles a saber he doesn’t actually have the power to wield.