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What is the most sophisticated piece of software/code ever written?

What is the most sophisticated piece of software/code ever written? →

Buckle in.

The most sophisticated software in history was written by a team of people whose names we do not know.

It’s a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010.

Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does.

If you've heard this story before, you already know what this worm is and the effect that it had. If you haven't, then you should ready this story. It's incredible. All the more so for being true.

No, Iran is Not a Democracy

No, Iran is Not a Democracy →

Before you get too excited about "moderates" winning Iranian elections, you might want to remember how one becomes a candidate in an Iranian election.

Elections in Iran are rigged even when they aren’t rigged.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei hand-picks everybody who runs for president. Moderates are rejected routinely. Only the less-moderate of the moderates—the ones who won’t give Khamenei excessive heartburn if they win—are allowed to run at all. Liberal and leftist candidates are rejected categorically.

Imagine Dick Cheney as the overlord of America allowing us to choose which one of his friends will be in the co-pilot’s seat. That’s not democracy. That’s not even a fake democracy.

​What about the elections for the Assembly of Experts? Doesn't that give moderate reformers a chance to gain power?

Everyone who gets to run in the election for the Assembly of Expert will be hand-picked by the Supreme Leader. And every single one of them will be an Islamic theologian. That’s what the Assembly of Experts is. A theocratic institution of Islamic theologians.

None of the “experts” are atheists. None of them are secularists. None of them are agnostic. None of them are liberals under any conceivable definition of the word liberal. Certainly none of them are Christians, Jews or Baha’is. They’re all Islamic theologians or they wouldn’t even be in the Assembly of Experts.

​Iran is a theocratic dictatorship, wearing the trappings of democracy. Under the current system of government, there will be no moderate leaders. There cannot be.

Thoughts on the VP Debate

Before the debate, I predicted that Congressman Ryan would wipe the floor with VP Biden. I was wrong. I'd forgotten how good/awful of a debater VP Biden is. He's good because he's always confident and never in doubt. He's awful because he completely makes stuff up and delivers the resulting manure with complete and utter sincerity. How do you fight that without falling into the trap of constantly fact checking your opponent rather than giving your own answers?

How about an example? Last night, they were asked about whether or not the United States should intervene in Syria (given the Libya intervention). And, if not, why not? VP Biden confidently stated that we absolutely should not get involved in Syria. Syria would be a tough intervention because it "is a different country, it is five times as large geographically, it has one fifth the population." Not true. Syria is 185,000 square kilometers, while Libya is 1.7 million square kilometers. Geographically, Libya is ten times larger than Syria. Rather than Syria having one fifth the population of Libya, it actually has 4 times the population that Libya does.

Or, how about VP Biden's confident assertions that we shouldn't worry about Iran's stockpile of fissile material because "they don't have a weapon to put it in"? What kind of argument is that? Building a nuclear weapon is trivial compared to what it takes to acquire fissile material. Pakistan's A.Q. Khan sold nuclear technology to multiple countries, including Iran. If Iran did have problems building a weapon, North Korea would be more than happy to share notes. If Iran doesn't have a weapon now, it's only because they like the plausible deniability of continuing to claim that all of their enrichment is for "energy generation".

In short, VP Biden looks impressive in a debate, unless you know all of the issues well enough to spot all of the times that he's free associating and losing contact with reality. On the appearance of substance, I'd have to rate the debate a tie. Both candidates appeared that they knew what they were talking about.

However, I think VP Biden flubbed horribly on the demeanor side of the debate. He may have forgotten that his job was to persuade undecided voters. As he listened to Congressman Ryan, he spent the entire evening laughing, making faces, or sighing. When he was speaking, VP Biden often sounded angry. He was strident and loud, often shouting, and interrupted Congressman Ryan frequently. It was one of the more unpleasant debates I've ever watched. VP Biden came across as a rude, angry, boor. I know that this fired up the Democrats who already plan to vote for the President and VP. I can't imagine that this will make his ticket attractive to undecided voters. Overall, I don't think this evening was a win for the Obama-Biden ticket.

Azerbaijan eyes aiding Israel against Iran

Azerbaijan eyes aiding Israel against Iran →

Israel may have an ally, for a strike against Iran, in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan, the oil-rich ex-Soviet republic on Iran's far northern border, has, say local sources with knowledge of its military policy, explored with Israel how Azeri air bases and spy drones might help Israeli jets pull off a long-range attack.

That is a far cry from the massive firepower and diplomatic cover that Netanyahu wants from Washington. But, by addressing key weaknesses in any Israeli war plan - notably on refueling, reconnaissance and rescuing crews - such an alliance might tilt Israeli thinking on the feasibility of acting without U.S. help.

Why would they help?

The country, home to nine million people whose language is close to Turkish and who mostly share the Shi'ite Muslim faith of Iran, has four ex-Soviet air bases that could be suitable for Israeli jets, the Azeri sources said.

Relations have long been strained between the former Soviet state and Iran, which is home to twice as many ethnic Azeris as Azerbaijan itself. Tehran beams an Azeri-language television channel over the border which portrays Aliyev as a puppet of Israel and the West, as well as highlighting corruption in Baku.

Azerbaijan sees Iranian hands behind its Islamist opposition and both countries have arrested alleged spies and agitators.

Faced with an uneven balance of force, Aliyev's government makes no bones about Israel being an ally. As one presidential aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, explained: "We live in a dangerous neighborhood; that is what is the most powerful driving force for our relationship with Israel."

But, of course. Iran is being their normal belligerent, export aggression selves and Azerbaijan wants some backup. If not for Hezbollah, I think Lebanon would be in the exact same boat. Azerbaijan wants to avoid Lebanon's fate, by making sure Iran never gets a foothold inside their borders.

Iran: Israel Must Be 'Eliminated'

Iran: Israel Must Be 'Eliminated' →

The Wall Street Journal editorial board on Israel and Iran.

Note that word—"eliminated." When Iranians talk about Israel, this intention of a final solution keeps coming up. In October 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad, quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini, said Israel "must be wiped off the map." Lest anyone miss the point, the Iranian President said in June 2008 that Israel "has reached the end of its function and will soon disappear off the geographical domain."

This pledge of erasing an entire state goes back to the earliest days of the Iranian revolution. "One of our major points is that Israel must be destroyed," Ayatollah Khomeini said in the 1980s.

Former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani—often described as a moderate in Western media accounts—had this to say in 2001: "If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."

So for Iran it is "not irrational" to contemplate the deaths of millions of Muslims in exchange for the end of Israel because millions of other Muslims will survive, but the Jewish state will not.

The world's civilized nations typically denounce such statements, as the U.S. State Department denounced Mr. Ahamadinejad's on Monday. But denouncing them is not the same as taking them seriously. Sometimes the greatest challenge for a civilized society is comprehending that not everyone behaves in civilized or rational fashion, that barbarians can still appear at the gate.

The tragic lesson of history is that sometimes barbarians mean what they say. Sometimes regimes do want to eliminate entire nations or races, and they will do so if they have the means and opportunity and face a timorous or disbelieving world.

As much as I like Ron Paul's foreign policy positions, this worries me. A lot. Getting Iran wrong is deadly. If it is "just rhetoric", I feel like it would be appropriate for the rest of the world to send a strong signal that there's no such thing as "just words". Rhetoric matters and deadly rhetoric may need to be responded to with deadly force.

Oil Sanctions and the Pretense of Knowledge

Oil Sanctions and the Pretense of Knowledge →

I mentioned last week that the recent rise in gasoline prices was most likely linked to the recent sanctions on Iran. Apparently, the sanctions were expressly designed to avoid an increase in gas prices.

U.S. sanctions, set out in Section 1245 of the National Defense Authorisation Act for Fiscal 2012 (HR 1540), apply only if the president determines “the price and supply of petroleum and petroleum products produced in countries other than Iran is sufficient to permit purchasers . . . to reduce significantly in volume their purchases from Iran”.

Sanctions do not apply if the president determines an importer has “significantly reduced” its volume of crude purchases from Iran, and the president can waive them altogether if it is in the national interest.

The law mandates experts at the Energy Information Administration (EIA), in conjunction with the departments of Treasury and State and the head of the intelligence community, to review the availability of alternative supplies every 60 days. [Emphasis added.]

So, what went wrong? Here's Sheldon Richman, with two of my favorite economics quotes.

The “experts” don’t know what they’re doing. They may think they do. They surely want us to think that. But they’ve got a problem: The matter they are grappling with does not permit the kind of knowledge they would need to design a plan calibrated to produce the results they seek. They’re up to their eyebrows in data, but what they need more than data they haven’t got, and there’s no way to get it.

The Problem Is People

Rube Goldberg had it easy. He had only to arrange a series of inanimate objects and an occasional parrot to create his problem-solving devices. The expert who tries to calibrate sanctions to harm only Iran, but not oil consumers, have to deal with people. He seems, Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,

to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chose to impress upon it.

F. A. Hayek had something similar in mind in his 1974 Nobel lecture, [“The Pretence of Knowledge”][4]: “[I]n the study of such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process . . . will hardly ever be fully known or measurable.”

The Oil Market Panic

The Oil Market Panic →

Richard Epstein looks at the recent run up in gas prices and concludes that it's mostly because of an increasingly hostile posture towards Iran.

Without question, the problem can be traced back to a renegade Iran. For good and sufficient political reasons, the West has come to see that the Iranian nuclear threat is not just bluster. Indeed, it poses far greater risks to world peace and the political order than even a major disruption in oil supplies.

Hence an anxious West has now put into place a reasonably effective concerted effort to cut off Iran from the world’s banking system, and to block the use of Iranian oil internationally, which has been made easier by the Saudis’ willingness to expand their own shipments into the world markets. Nor have the Iranians sat back idly. They have cut off exports to the United Kingdom and France, a move that is largely symbolic. But the Iranian threat to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which about one-third the world’s oil supplies travel, is not symbolic. Nor is the movement of the U.S. aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, into the Strait of Hormuz, merely symbolic.

For both the short and the middle term, these developments have driven the base-line price of Brent crude from the North Sea up to around $119 per barrel. That translates into a potential price at the pump of about $4.25 per gallon, which undoubtedly will eat into the pocketbooks of many Americans.

He concludes that the worst possible thing, for gas prices, is for politicians to start looking for "something to do". (And, yes, he criticizes both Democrats and Republicans on this issue.) Rather, we should sit back and let individuals and companies figure out the best way to react to the increased risk and the possibility of sudden shortages.

The question on the table is how best to respond to the disruptions in oil supplies, not to pretend that these disruptions do not exist. On this score, the great advantage of a market system is that it forces Mr. Coudle (and everyone else) to think hard about the relative value of the goods and services he consumes and to make cutbacks in a cheap and rational fashion. In both good times and bad, people are always having to decide which goods and services to spend their incomes on, and which to forego.

Price movements give them an accurate, instantaneous, and impersonal picture of how other people value various goods and services. When oil prices rise, its least valuable uses are the first to drop out of the system. The decisions are typically made on a continuous basis, so that if some people find that they have cut back purchases by too much (or too little), they can increase (or decrease) their purchases in the next pricing period. Spurred on by these price increases, people can also make changes in their spending patterns elsewhere to offset the inconvenience of the higher prices for oil products. Purchasing a hybrid, insulating your home, and moving closer to work are just some of the many ways to save money. Good luck to Mr. Coudle, who provides an object lesson in how that task should be done.

The great risk is that the government will undermine the market by resorting to centralized devices to cap the price increases or to dictate its collective vision of the just price. Now is the time to recall the lessons of Friedrich Hayek’s best writing, the scholarly essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), which is about the superiority of a decentralized price mechanism in response to system-wide shocks. As he reminds us, “The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all separate individuals possess.”

If You Must Be An Empire, Don't Be An Incompetent Empire

If You Must Be An Empire, Don't Be An Incompetent Empire →

Jerry Pournelle, on foreign policy.

Iraq is another story. We’re pulling out. We have spent $Trillions, we have left chaos, we have removed a major threat to the stability of Iran, and I am not sure what we got out of it. And Iraq certainly does have stuff we want. Oil, to begin with. A fair amount of Yellowcake – uranium ore. Lots of other stuff. And we’re running out because the Iraqis insist on applying Iraqi “law and order” to the US forces in Iraq.

I’d be tempted give them a $3 Trillion bill on the way out, and leave an occupation force in one of their major oil fields where we’d be pumping oil and selling it until most of the bill was paid, but that option was apparently never considered. Incidentally, we could defend our occupied oil fields with Sudanese and for that matter Libyan mercenaries, which we pay for out of the oil proceeds.We wouldn’t need a large US force in Iraq; they could be in Kuwait . Pumping lots of Iraqi oil would drop the world price of crude, and be a great jobs program for the United States.

... I don’t much like Empire as a policy, but if we are going to play Empire, can’t we find someone who knows how to do it competently?

The Road to Fatima Gate

Michael Totten is one of the most intrepid reporters that you've never heard of. He (mostly) travels alone, he stays independent, he talks to the people on the street and he reports exactly what he sees and hears. He's seemingly unafraid of Islamic radicals or anyone else.

The Road to Fatima Gate is his first book.

The Road to Fatima Gate is a first-person narrative account of revolution, terrorism, and war during history's violent return to Lebanon after fifteen years of quiet. Michael J. Totten's version of events in one of the most volatile countries in the world's most volatile region is one part war correspondence, one part memoir, and one part road movie.

He sets up camp in a tent city built in downtown Beirut by anti-Syrian dissidents, is bullied and menaced by Hezbollah's supposedly friendly "media relations" department, crouches under fire on the Lebanese-Israeli border during the six-week war in 2006, witnesses an Israeli ground invasion from behind a line of Merkava tanks, sneaks into Hezbollah's post-war rubblescape without authorization, and is attacked in Beirut by militiamen who enforce obedience to the "resistance" at the point of a gun.

The Near East Report interviewed Michael Totten about his book and about Fatima Gate.

Sol Stern wrote a review for the City Journal.

And Peter Robinson, from the Hoover Institute, did a video interview with Michael Totten about the book.

I think the book is worth a read.

Now They'll Like Us?

Apparently, the Iranians don't like President-elect Obama as much as America does.

While the US election results and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's congratulatory letter to President-elect Obama have sparked debate among Iranian officials and media about the prospects for improved relations with Washington, media connected to key power centers in Iran, including President Ahmadinejad, have harshly criticized Obama, calling him a "house slave" days before Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qa'ida's second in command, used the same term.

  • In an 11 November commentary, Borna News Agency, which is close to Ahmadinezhad, called Obama a "house slave," adding that those who "trust such a politician lack maturity, if they are not committing treason" -- a likely reference to Iranian moderates. A day earlier, in an interview with Borna, Ahmadinezhad's press adviser Ali Akbar Javanfekr characterized Ahmadinezhad's letter to Obama as a "new political move" and advised Obama "not to make the mistake of not responding."

  • In an editorial entitled "A Dark Person Rises to Remove Darkness From America," Sobh-e Sadegh, which is published by Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i's representative to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), wrote that "Obama's acceptance of unconditional negotiations with Iran" would signal a "new beginning" only if "coexistence with a nuclear Iran and acceptance of its regional role are part of the US negotiating position." It added that the "appointment of the extremist Jew Rahm Emanuel as the [White House] chief of staff is not a good sign" (10 November).

  • In an editorial entitled "The Great Satan Masked as Obama," the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) said that the "United States is the embodiment of Satan. Hence, in this circus, for anyone but the slaves of Satan to take charge of the government is impossible." It added that Iranians "who are ecstatic about Obama are either ignorant or have a plot [against Iran]" (5 November).

There's more.

Who We're Fighting in Iraq

Attrition: Al Qaeda Fades From Iraq

But the most compelling bit of news on al Qaedas demise in Iraq is the changing composition of the hostiles there. At the beginning of the year, about 70 percent of terror attacks were by al Qaeda, and their Sunni Arab allies. Now, only about fifty percent of , a lower number of, those attacks are al Qaeda. The rest are Iranian supported Shia Arab groups, who are also trying to establish a religious dictatorship in Iraq (one run by Shias, not by Sunnis, as al Qaeda wants.) Al Qaeda is taking a major beating because so many Sunni Arab tribes have turned on it. Three years ago, al Qaeda formed a coalition with the Sunni Arab tribes, promising that al Qaeda terrorists would put Sunni Arabs back in charge of the country. Few Sunni Arabs still believe that, and consider al Qaeda a murderous nuisance.

Iran has backed Shia Arab militias even before the 2003 invasion. Iranian involvement goes back to the 1980s war with Iraq (and even earlier). One of the reasons for that war (which began with an Iraqi invasion of Iran), was Shia clerics taking over the government in Iran, and announcing their intention to take over the world. While the rest of the world was not too concerned, Saddam Hussein was. That's because most (well, 60 percent back then) of Iraqis are Shia Moslems, just like over 90 percent of Iranians. Iran wanted to influence Iraqi Shias, and convince them (through persuasion or intimidation) to support Iran. Once Saddam was out of the way, Iran went forward with its plan. Islamic radicals in the Iranian government are willing to start another civil war in Iraq to get their way. And that's what's happening now, as U.S. troops go after Iranian supported Iraqi Shias who have been attacking American troops.

Senator Lieberman on Iraq

Senator Lieberman on Iraq. A few excerpts.

The officials I met in Baghdad said that 90% of suicide bombings in Iraq today are the work of non-Iraqi, al Qaeda terrorists.

[Our commanders in Baghdad] point out that the crux of al Qaeda's strategy is to spark Iraqi civil war.

Al Qaeda is launching spectacular terrorist bombings in Iraq, such as the despicable attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra this week, to try to provoke sectarian violence. Its obvious aim is to use Sunni-Shia bloodshed to collapse the Iraqi government and create a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, radicalizing the region and providing a base from which to launch terrorist attacks against the West.

Facts on the ground also compel us to recognize that Iran is doing everything in its power to drive us out of Iraq, including providing substantive support, training and sophisticated explosive devices to insurgents who are murdering American soldiers.

One Arab leader told me during my trip that he is extremely concerned about Tehran's nuclear ambitions, but that he doubted America's staying power in the region and our political will to protect his country from Iranian retaliation over the long term. Abandoning Iraq now would substantiate precisely these gathering fears across the Middle East that the U.S. is becoming an unreliable ally.

Anbar was one of al Qaeda's major strongholds in Iraq and the region where the majority of American casualties were occurring.

When I returned to Anbar on this trip, however, the security environment had undergone a dramatic reversal. Attacks on U.S. troops there have dropped from an average of 30 to 35 a day a few months ago to less than one a day now. ... One of Ramadi's leading sheikhs told me: "A rifle pointed at an American soldier is a rifle pointed at an Iraqi."

In Anbar, for example, the U.S. military has been essential to the formation and survival of the tribal alliance against al Qaeda, simultaneously holding together an otherwise fractious group of Sunni Arab leaders through deft diplomacy, while establishing a political bridge between them and the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad. "This is a continuous effort," Col. Charlton said. "We meet with the sheikhs every single day and at every single level."

In Baghdad, U.S. forces have cut in half the number of Iraqi deaths from sectarian violence since the surge began in February. They have also been making critical improvements in governance, basic services and commercial activity at the grassroots level.

The question now is, do we consolidate and build on the successes that the new strategy has achieved, keeping al Qaeda on the run, or do we abandon them?

Contrasting Freedom With Oppression

On Friday, Fred Thompson reminded us of the importance of engaging the world with our ideas:

It's equally tragic that the U.S. is in no position to provide the victims of [Hugo Chavez] with the truth. There was a time, though, when Americans were on the front lines of pro-freedom movements all over the world. I'm talking about the "surrogate" broadcast network that included Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, often called "the Radios."

When Ronald Reagan was elected, he greatly empowered the private, congressionally funded effort and handpicked the Radios' top staff to bring freedom to the Soviet Union. Steve Forbes led the group.

Cynics still say that the USSR fell of its own weight, and that President Reagan's efforts to bring it down were irrelevant, but Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev say differently. Both have said that, without the Radios, the USSR wouldn't have fallen. The Radios were not some bland public relations effort, attracting audiences only with American pop music. They engaged the intellectual and influential populations behind the Iron Curtain with accurate news and smart programming about freedom and democracy. They had sources and networks within those countries that sometimes outperformed the CIA. When Soviet hardliners and reformers were facing off, and crowds and tanks were on the streets of Moscow and Bucharest, the radios were sending real-time information to the people, including the military, and reminding them of what was at stake.

Unfortunately, we scaled back the Radios and are in no position to use them to influence the Middle East or Latin America.

Fred Thompson mentioned that "we'll have a whole new set of media technologies" to use, if we start to stand up to today's dictators. It's true. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez has forced Radio Caracas Television off of the air, for the heinous crime of disliking him. RCT has decided to keep fighting anyway. Instead of broadcasting their content over their airwaves, they are broadcasting it over YouTube. Last Friday, YouTube listed RCT as their most-subscribed feed of the week. Today's dictators will have a much harder time controlling the flow of information than yesterday's dictators. I think that's something worth celebrating.

Finally, if Iran's government is so peace-loving and wants only to be granted a measure of respect, why are the Iranians so busy clamping down on freedom in their own country?

Unemployment among young Iranians is about 50 percent. Some 40 percent of the population is on the government payroll, and there is not enough oil money to pay off all the people who do support the government (about a third of the population). Thus the government keeps printing more money, and the result in an inflation rate of over 20 percent. The Iranian people are getting increasingly restless, and, more ominously, surly. The government has relied on street level gangs of young Islamic conservatives to discourage such behavior. But it isn't working, and there have been more and more street battles. The government can more readily call in reinforcements, and has won all these brawls so far. But if the government starts losing them, it's the beginning of the end. Some of the kids have cell phones, a technology the government tried to keep out. The fear is that a street level disturbance will result in the protestors calling in their own reinforcements, defeating the security forces, and spreading. The clerics fear an event similar to the one that suddenly destroyed communist rule in Russia and Eastern Europe 18 years ago. For that reason, much attention and cash is spent on the street level muscle (the Basij militia), and a constant willingness to use physical violence against any protests or "un-Islamic" behavior.

There is a difference between the U.S. and our enemies. We need to remember that. More importantly, we need to highlight it whenever and wherever possible.

Another Reason Not to Trust Iran

The Iranians have kidnapped another American. Noah Pollak, writing at Michael Totten's Middle East Journal, has the details:

Haleh Esfandiari is the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, and in December of last year she traveled to Iran to visit her ailing mother. In a statement on its website, the Wilson Center explains that in late December, "on her way to the airport to catch a flight back to Washington, the taxi in which Dr. Esfandiari was riding was stopped by three masked, knife-wielding men. They took away her baggage and handbag, including her Iranian and American passports." Her visit to a passport office four days later instigated six weeks of interrogations. Last Monday, just over a week ago, she was arrested and taken to the notorious Evin prison, where she stands accused of being a Mossad agent, a U.S. spy, and of trying to foment revolution inside Iran -- the same charges that were leveled at the American embassy staff in 1979 when it was taken hostage.

Noah reports that the Washington Post has warned Iran that they risk losing the world's "respect". American politicians have been, if anything, less forceful:

Several politicians have also weighed in, and they haven't done any better. In a statement sure to send an ominous chill across the Iranian political establishment, Barak Obama announced that "If the Iranian government has any desire to engage the world in dialogue, it can demonstrate that desire by releasing this champion of dialogue from detention." Haleh Esfandiari's senators, Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, asked Iran to make a "gesture of goodwill" to the American people by releasing their latest hostage. Respect, dialogue, gestures of goodwill. I'll bring my acoustic guitar and some big fluffy pillows and we can do a sing-along for Ahmadinejad.

Noah ties the recent hostage taking back to the 1979 imprisonment of the American embassy:

And the hostage-takers and the government that sponsored them never paid a serious price for the ensuing fifteen-month humiliation of the United States. Iran has also never paid for its various assassinations and bombings in Europe, the murder of hundreds of American marines and French soldiers in Lebanon in 1983, the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people, its lavish funding of Hezbollah and destabilization of Lebanon, the abduction of the British sailors, its nuclear program, and so on. In other words, the Iranian regime, since the first day of its existence, has seen its every provocation go unanswered -- which has perfectly reinforced its conviction that the West, and America in particular, is a brittle facade, economically powerful and technologically sophisticated but weak-willed, indecisive, risk-averse, and easily intimidated.

Somehow, I don't think that a desire for "dialog" is what drives Iran. I think it's a desire for power. And no amount of talking is going to convince Iran to stop bombing, kidnapping, funding terrorism, or refining nuclear material. I don't want to rush to war -- our military is stretched thin enough as it is -- but we need to do something more than just "talk" at the Iranians. As you can see, that strategy has worked out so well already.

This entry was tagged. Foreign Policy Iran