The Man With A Plan ...

... Or a rebel without a clue. Pick you poison because John Edwards has decided we should talk with Iran directly, if he is elected president:

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards says, if elected next year, his administration would open direct talks with Iran to try to contain Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Edwards proposes an abrupt shift in Bush administration policy toward Iran in an article he wrote for Foreign Affairs magazine's upcoming issue, saying he would boost U.S. diplomacy worldwide if elected in November 2008.

Edwards does not rule out the option of military force, saying: "With a threat so serious, no U.S. president should take any option off the table."

But he would be prepared to engage the government of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a way that has not been done since the United States severed relations after Tehran's 1979 revolution.

President George W. Bush has refused talks with Iran over its nuclear program, limiting contacts to talks about Iraq. Tehran denies it is seeking nuclear weapons.

Edwards' comments come as the United States accuses Iran of sending lethal explosive devices to Iraq that are being used to kill American and Iraqi soldiers.

U.S. officials said on Wednesday they may soon designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization in a move targeting the finances of the group. It would be the first time the United States has placed the armed forces of a sovereign government on its terrorist list.

Edwards said "instead of saber-rattling about military action, we should employ an effective combination of carrots and sticks" and try to isolate Ahmadinejad from moderate forces within his country while continuing to offer Iran economic incentives for good behavior.

"At the same time, we must use much more serious economic sanctions to deter Ahmadinejad's government when it refuses to cooperate," the former North Carolina senator wrote. "To do this, we will have to deal with Iran directly. Such diplomacy is not a gift, nor is it a concession."

First Barack Obama says he would meet with our enemies, which earned him the description of "inexperienced" and "naive." Now, John Edwards would negotiate with them one-on-one. Even Reagan was willing to sit down with Gorbachev, but he did so from a position of strength, and as yet we have not projected that to Iran. If we were, they would not still be sending soldiers and munitions into Iraq.

We cannot sit down and negotiate with a nation that is hostile towards us and our allies int he region. We cannot negotiate with a nation intent on building nuclear weapons, and threatening the region with them. These people do not want carrots; they want a new caliphate. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stated that he wants to bring back the old Persian Empire, and that Iran should be ruling it as it did before.

We do not need to go to war with Iran to beat them. We only need to do what we did to the Soviets, which led to their collapse. You isolate them. You constrain their ability to trade. We have noticed that their economy is on shaky ground, and others have taken notice of it, as well. That recent criticism, noted yesterday by Iran's top judicial cleric, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi. In his own words, he says that " If we repeatedly change managers and ministers, nothing will improve." He is referring to the number of financial ministers that Ahmadinejad has replaced since coming into power.

Sitting down with them is not the answer. We were duped by North Korea back in the 1990s. The last thing we can afford to do is be duped again, and by a leader that is far more unstable than Kim Jong-Il.

Marcie