Our host, Ed Morrissey, has posted a rather puzzling endorsement of a USA Today op-ed by Sarah Palin on the subject of Iran. While each contain a number of glowing generalizations and hope for the power of positive thinking, I found myself left with a rather unsatisfied feeling from each.

As to the original Palin op-ed, I can save both you and I a fair bit of time by urging you to read and fully explore the links in this response from Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway. While I don’t come anywhere near doing it full justice in a few bullet points, there are three key points to be made there:

1. Yes, we all know that the Mullahs are bad. This is not a news flash.

2. Saying our sanctions should be “tougher” and have “more teeth” doesn’t do any good as long as so many other key players don’t go along with them. (And we’re not just talking about Russia. It’s China, Japan, India, and South Korea to name just a few.) For an example of how well that works, just look at how efficiently we starved Castro out of Cuba.

3. No matter how much we might bray about “standing with the people” of Iran against their government, it means little if you’re not actually going to invade when Iran’s leaders don’t really seem to care what we think.

But the supporting responses to the original piece also seem to beg more than a few questions. First, there is this rather curious description:

Palin calls for a return to a proven strategy from the Cold War

This particular rib is poked in a couple of directions, concerning not only how to deal with Iran itself but how “to get Russia on board with sanctions against Iran” and is conflated with the current food fight going on over the START treaty. While it’s always a warm and fuzzy experience to summon up the ghost of Ronald Reagan, trying to compare our stance against the final years of the Soviet Union and the Russians today is rather disingenuous at best. While we certainly took a hard, effective stand against the U.S.S.R. it eventually collapsed under its own bloated weight more so than from any direct offensive action on our part. That’s rather different than today’s far more compact – and in many ways resurgent – Russia and their position on the world stage.

But perhaps the most glaring point is the seeming assertion that the situation with Iran might be different were it not for the fact that it “took Obama weeks to offer any kind of rhetorical support” for the Iranian people during the uprising of 2009. Granted, the president seemed to be sticking to his campaign offering of “an open hand if you will just unclench your fist.” Is that a viable strategy? Time alone will tell.

But foreign policy is a popular area for critics to turn presidents into punching bags. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. This is pointed out when Ed declares, less than a paragraph later, that Iran’s leaders have no interest in our friendship and frankly don’t care much what we say one way or the other. Without vast international support which currently is lacking, it’s still all just rhetoric.

In the end, Iran’s government will only “go away” via one of two routes. Either they will need to be taken down my military incursion or the Iranian people – who frequently don’t like America much more than they like their current leaders – will take matters in their own hands and create a new government which will hopefully be easier to deal with.

The former strategy is obviously not an option for any sane politician at home, given the nation’s weary outlook on the current efforts to create new democracies at gunpoint. And the Iranian people don’t seem ready to make the leap. So in the end, Governor Palin’s “advice” to the president seems to boil down to one demand.

We must replace the failed rhetoric of Barack Obama with an entirely new flavor of failed rhetoric!

It may tug on some sympathetic heartstrings, but it’s not much of a foreign policy.

Now you can yell at Jazz for being a stupid, wrong-headed RINO even faster than by just leaving a comment. Follow him on Twitter! @JazzShaw

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
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