When Dealing With Iran , No Love, Just Toughness

David Johnson, Co-Founder of U.S. Alliance for Democratic Iran told the Wall Street Journal:

When it comes to rogue regimes, the bitter truth is that diplomatic engagement is futile. The root cause of the nuclear crisis with Iran is not a shortage of "economic incentives"; it is the nature of the regime in power in Tehran.

Iran is ruled by an irreformable theocratic regime that has worked to ensure its survival by brutal crackdown of political dissent at home, exporting fundamentalism and sponsoring terrorism abroad as well as developing weapons of mass destruction. Thus it would be naïve to assume that the mullahs will agree to undermine their survivability by abandoning one of the regime's main pillars, possessing the A-bomb.

Engaging Iran is not futile if we make the Iranian people, not the tyrants, the focus of a new and comprehensive policy. This policy must ensure the unseating of the clerical regime by Iranians themselves as a necessary step toward eliminating what President Bush described as "conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder" in the world.