Like CJ says, that fist sure looks clenched.

US President Barack Obama’s offer to talk to Iran shows that America’s policy of “domination” has failed, the government spokesman said on Saturday.

“This request means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed,” Gholam Hossein Elham was quoted as saying by the Mehr news agency.

“Negotiation is secondary, the main issue is that there is no way but for (the United States) to change,” he added.

Surprised by the knock on capitalism from jihad HQ? Don’t be. The enemy of Iran’s enemy is its friend, which is why they’ve buddied up to anti-American socialist regimes via the Nonaligned Movement with a special emphasis on Chavez. International opinion matters, especially to Democrats, and digs at capitalism help advance Iran’s cause internationally even if they’re not exactly a raison d’etre for Islamic fundamentalists. (See also Bin Laden talking up Noam Chomsky and dumping on corporations in his last video message.) The significance of this isn’t that they’re using The One’s outreach to their own ends; self-aggrandizing propaganda is what Islamists do, after all, which is why Israel kicking the hell out of Hamas for a few weeks somehow gets spun as a Hamas victory. The significance is that it shows how obsessed the regime is with the perception that it’s winning its ideological battle with the west, to the extent that even rare attempts at rapprochement from the U.S. are sneered at as crude concessions of defeat. Like I’ve said before, that bodes very, very ill given how much national pride they’ve invested in the nuclear program. How can they make a deal with America to give up nukes when they’ve built their identity on defiance of America? Why, it’s practically a national slogan.