On Iran...

I must say that the partial successes of Iraq are overshadowed by several miserable failures in the wider Middle East. To begin with, the WMD fiasco allowed, perhaps encouraged Iran to steam ahead with its own nukes. It's always a bad thing to have more nations with nukes, especially hostile ones. This was brought about by the foreign diplomacy that crushed one nation (Iraq) for thinking about nukes while letting another one (North Korea) forge ahead with a full fledged program. This sent the message, "get nukes or get crushed", which compromised one of the only deterrants to going nuclear. To be quite honest, if we were to maintain that policy line, which is acceptable, we should have played real tough with Iran, & when they refused, given Israel the go-ahead. That would have maintained a consistent and strong policy line in the Middle East. Of course if we had never made the WMD argument, we wouldn't have to maintain the policy, but what's done is done. Would the Iranians hate us? perhaps, but does it matter anyway when the people who run their country aren't elected (and hate us anyway)? As it stands, the Iranians have supposedly frozen their arms program, but that is a temporary solution. We should try and work it out peacefully, most effectively if we were to go to Russia (the Nuclear "contractors) and work something out, but if that fails we need to be able to show that we can be serious.