Communicating with Iran

Jay Ambrose:

Can you believe that Joe Lieberman? Iran has gone to war with us, sending troops across its border with Iraq to kill perhaps as many as 200 of our soldiers, and Lieberman wants to stop them.
His gall doesn’t end with saying that Iran should be asked to quit it, which the administration has done. He has gone so far as to propose we take military action against the base where hostile soldiers are being trained.
He is not talking about a massive ground invasion. Air power ought to do the trick, he says, adding that military strategists are the ones who actually ought to decide such things. Simply getting serious and telling Iran what’s coming and meaning it might do the trick, too, which is to say, Lieberman has gone much, much too far.

After all, no one likes tough talk. It makes our enemies nervous, and also many of those who are supposedly our friends, people of the appeasing type who worry more about diplomacy than defending U.S. troops from harm.
Tough talk makes people nervous in this country, too, especially some Democrats. Lieberman is not one of those anymore. He used to be, even to the extent of being Al Gore’s running mate. But his outrageous common sense about terrorism cost him a Democratic primary in his most recent re-election. He had to make it back to the Senate as an independent.
The really irritating thing about Lieberman is not just that he thinks there really is a terrorist threat that must be thwarted, but that his arguments are so hard to refute. Hitting back could be necessary, he says, to give the U.S. a chance of winning the Iraq war. Flub that, as we may eventually discover, and the terrorist threat on our own shores will be much greater.

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There is more.

Lieberman is right about Iran. However we are still locked into the fruitless gesture of pretending that there is something to be gained from "negotiating" with this government of bad faith and evil. Pretending that they are not at war with us is not going to get them to change their conduct.