C'mon Indie - we all know - because we've been told - appeasement NEVER works!  Multilateral diplomacy does! 

Good read!  The rats are scramblin' to get away from the sinking administration vessel and get aboard that Legacy ship! 

It's way too much to hope that appeasement might work with Iran, though - that's a Democratic idea, right? 

Talk-i-fying don't solve things. What we were doing in North Korea was pre-emptive diplomacy warfare. W sent in James Bond and Jason Bourne, with sharks with freaking laser beams. W did not do talking!

Well, the fact is the threat of military action is a major deterrent to these pissant dictators. Deterrence works. But, us having our army bogged down in Iraq, bleeding 30- 120 lives a month, spending bajillions of dollars isn't a deterrent to anyone. That is a signal to these little whackjobs like Al Sadr, and DJ Kim 2 the J 2 the Illin' that the US military has limits. Those include the reality that these little pissants can survive even after we occupy their hellhole nations.

The threat of force was much stronger before we invaded Iraq, considering the fact that Saddam actually tried to surrender prior to the invasion, turn over the place to the UN or the USA, and go into exile. Had we done that, and used the Iraqi army to keep the peace, then we could have used the continued threat of invasion against other nation states, like Iran, or Syria, or North Korea.

DJ KJ isn't giving up his nuyclee-er facilities because he's afraid; he's doing it for cash.

Iran won't come to the table out of fear; they are already at the table, they have already abandoned their Nuke weapons ambitions, and the IAEA and the EU are talking with the Iranians. The Iranians after 9-11 were trying to help the USA, and they were turning over, or gunning down the Taliban and Al Queda guys back in 2001-2002. But the Bushies refused to engage in diplomacy, and had to rattle their sabers.

Nice article.  It does miss one salient point about the North Korea situation.  This move by the War Chimp was done based on a report by the Chinese government.  The Chinese have declared North Korea is moving away from nuclear weapons.  This same Chinese government has done nothing to improve its human rights record since their establishment.  Rather than try to get China to improve their record on human rights and democracy, we surrendered in a Cold War that never happened.  We torture prisoners, ala China.  Wal-Mart et al use cheap Chinese labor in what are essentially slave labor conditions.  We have borrowed vast sums from China to pay for Iraq; they own us by the short hairs.  There is pressure from China that says leave our guys in Korea alone or we will call in our notes.  Therefore, the War Chimp has dutifully done the bidding of another country.

Let's put the overt military threat to Iran in historical prospective. 

In 1951, for the first time since only God know when, Iran elected a REAL democratic government, lead by a very popular man named Muhammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister.  Before then, Iran had been ruled by a series of "dynasties" changing through various uprisings, "convinent arrangements", cunning and outright coups.  Since the discovery of oil in 1908, these "changes" were mostly influenced by the British Empire.  During World War 2, Iran was invaded by Great Britian and Russia in order to use it's inferstructure and resourses for the war effort.  The person we knew as "The Shah of Iran" (western term for clearity used here) was the brother of the ruler at the time of the invasion, Reza Khan (the result of a British influenced military revolt).  Reza Khan had deep ties with Germany, so the invading forces installed Muhammed Reza Pahlavi so that they would have a "friend" running the show, in insuring that Iran stayed loyal to the invaders.  The "Shah" at this time was nothing more than a figure head, much like the Queen of England is today

In 1951, Muhammed Mossadegh and his parlimentary party dominated Iran.  He set out to create democratic reforms.  He was tired of the "western influences" taking resourses, and thier monetary value out of Iran.  He decided to nationalize the oil resourses of Iran.  Of course, the British oil company then known as the Anglo Iranian Oil Company...now called British Petroleum, and Great Britian at first thought that a boycott of Iranian oil would work.  It, of course did not.  In 1953, Great Britain and the United States conspired to overthrow PM Mossadegh.  The British first asked Harry Truman, who turned them down.  They then asked Dwight Eisenhower, and he was good with it.  As a condition of helping the Brits, if the coup was successful, all five major American oil companies at that time, and the Dutch and the French petro companies would get a cut of the business.

Using media lies through the BBC, (mostly that Mossadegh was connected with communists) bribes of tribal leaders in Southern Iran to harbour clandestine agents of the Brits and the CIA, the coup, after at first struggling, was successful.  Muhammed Mossadegh was arrested, given a summary judgement and sentanced to death.  The "Shah" supposedly showed mercy, reduced his sentance to 3 years in jail, and house arrest for the rest of his life.  He died in March of 1967.

Of course, the "Shah" was reinstalled by the success of the coup.  He and appointed western proxies  operated Iran's "government".  Muhammed Reza Pahlavi clamped down hard on opposistion to western rule with the help of the Brits and Americans.  Through the National Intelligence and Security Agency (SAVAK in Iran) he and his minions used whatever was neccessery to keep opposistion down, to censer the media, and to keep the western powers happy includeing torture and assasination.  In other words, you might say  that Iran was, for all intent and purpose, a western dictatorship.  Of course the oil was flowing again, British Petroleum and the American, Dutch, and French petro companies are happy, and the Iranians loose thier revenue and resourse...until 1979, when the Iranian Revolution began that took down the Pahlavi dynasty fairly quickly, and the loudest and most known critic of the dynasty the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenini became the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran on 1 April 1979.

And now we start all over again.  Same old stuff, different day.  Perhaps it is good that North Korea has no oil.  It seems that it is a black, liquid curse.