the god anubis

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Two weeks before the Iran elections, the Leveretts wrote about our maybe already having lost Iran:

Iranian diplomats have told us that the president's professed willingness to deal with Iran on the "basis of mutual interest" in an atmosphere of "mutual respect" was particularly well received in Tehran. They say that the quick response of the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - which included the unprecedented statement that "should you change, our behavior will change, too" - was a sincere signal of Iran's openness to substantive diplomatic proposals from the new American administration.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama is backing away from the bold steps required to achieve strategic, Nixon-to-China-type rapprochement with Tehran. Administration officials have professed disappointment that Iranian leaders have not responded more warmly to Mr. Obama's rhetoric. Many say that the detention of the Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi (who was released this month) and Ayatollah Khamenei's claim last week that America is "fomenting terrorism" inside Iran show that trying to engage Tehran is a fool's errand.

But this ignores the real reason Iranian leaders have not responded to the new president more enthusiastically: the Obama administration has done nothing to cancel or repudiate an ostensibly covert but well-publicized program, begun in President George W. Bush's second term, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize the Islamic Republic. Under these circumstances, the Iranian government - regardless of who wins the presidential elections on June 12 - will continue to suspect that American intentions toward the Islamic Republic remain, ultimately, hostile.

I, of course, feel you should go to the link and read the whole thing, but this bit was enough to put me in mind of the jackals again today. If you are a young twitterer coming here to see what awful, undemocratic thing I have to say next, I have caught snatches of kids disparaging the Leveretts and their think tank as some sort of neocon group, and I think you really ought to go to their site and disabuse yourself of that notion with all speed. At the bottom of that page is a little "On Day One" montage of their suggestions for our new president, and if you don't have the patience to read what they write to discern, you can get a pretty clear shot by listening to the voices on that video.

[Or watch this video about a couple of retired CIA covert ops, NOCs, giving CBS the lowdown on our options. Give Iran the recognition and bring them into the international community, or turn them into the next Iraq. Sit down and consider how heavily the propaganda is being weighted toward the second option. Do you want that?]