Back to a comment I made somewhere last week -- too lazy to find it.

If you want to keep a regime in its box, sabre rattling and isolation are fine. If you want to pursue regime change by any method other than war, then the last thing you want to do is to threaten and isolate, because it just reinforces the hand of the hardliners at the very time their grip may be weakening. I used the former communist regimes as an example.

Engagement isn't the same as "legitimation" of the regime. And throughout you can distinguish between the Iranian people (the Chinese people, the Polish people, etc) and their current regime. It also means you focus on things they're being helpful on -- and reward them -- and things you really want them to stop (not strategic stuff but things like assasinating folks) -- and go after those specific incidents to change behavior.

The idealists, who think doing business with evil is itself evil, don't understand the instrumental nature of engagement. And the revolutionaries, who think that just a little more pressure from the outside will trigger the hoped-for internal conflagration, are deluded, to put it charitably.

So we're now pursuing a "policy" that doesn't make sense according to any philosophy or objectives, as far as I can see.

BTW -- just found an Iranian (mostly English language) portal that appears to be excellent on news/opinion -- covers lots of different views -- Persian Journal. Can't tell who is sponsoring, or how long it's been around. Know anything about it? Hat tip, Eclectic Refrigerator

Based on this, I think we can put Persian Journal in the "non-credible" basket ...

Now we know their copyrighted "news" features need to be handled with care. I wonder, however, whether their Iranian news is a bit more reliable. It might be worth comparing with Payvand.

Exactly ... and the critics of attempts at engagement ignore the WTO issue, which in my opinion makes it hard to fairly evaluate the situation. If we really wanted to be clever (but still wanted to keep Iran out of the WTO for proliferation purposes), we could take our case directly to the Iranian people and very publicly and loudly push for WTO membership (in exchange for X, Y, and Z) as a way to get at Iran's economic woes ... if the hardliners spike the deal, they're the bad guy, and we still "win." Iran isn't closed off; people there can still get news.

I agree with you both. I have argued about these policies vis-a-vis Cuba on more than one occasion. Conversations such as this do make me question the motives of decision makers though. Do they really want a peaceful resolution?

You raise an important point. And I'd be willing to wager a least a small sum that the original impetus behind effectively overturning a Congressional exemption for publication came from the anti-Cuba types. You know, the same ones who would have made in impossible for folks in Fla to send money to keep their families going or would have made travel even more impossible than ever.

I'm afraid that it's going to take a very vocal, very active Iranian-American diaspora to mobilize for an engagement policy to get the US off the current path -- just repeating all the errors we've made for several generations with Cuba.