STOP THIS MADNESS WITH IRAN

According to observers, the reason why George Bush is arranging to sell billions in the most advanced war planes and bombs to certain Arab Sunni states, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, is to hem in non-Arab Shiite Iran and to show it that it has enemies well-armed in its immediate vicinity.

Robin Wright writes today in The Washington Post that Bush and Cheney see themselves, and thus by extension, the United States, in another "cold war," only this time with Iran.

"When the first Cold War began, in 1946, Winston Churchill famously spoke of an Iron Curtain that had divided Europe. As Cold War II begins half a century later, the Bush administration is trying to drape a kind of Green Curtain dividing the Middle East between Iran's friends and foes. The new showdown may well prove to be the most enduring legacy of the Iraq conflict. The outcome will certainly shape the future of the Middle East -- not least because the administration's strategy seems so unlikely to work."

This is foreign policy madness not seen in over 50 years since the anti-communist crusades of the 1950s. Bush and Cheney think they have an "evil" country in Iran that they must put in its place. They see threats in everything Teheran says or does. But this does not have to be.

Instead of firing missiles and bullets at the Iranians, let's sit down with them and work out a peaceful solution to threats perceived on both sides. Iranians are well-educated, young and sophisticated. Although some Iranians are gung-ho with sharia as the law of Iran, most Iranians are willing to live and let live without the need to convert the rest of the world.

The solution of Bush/Cheney - filling the entire Middle East with cluster bombs and war planes - will never work. The "hard power" of the United States is impotent in changing a people's beliefs and way of life, or in making other nations genuflect to the United States. Rather, Americans need to sit down with the Iranians and cooperate with them. In other words, befriend them. All other solutions are futile, retrograde and reminiscent of the foolish foreign policy of America when it thought that it as the most powerful world militaristic power could bully other countries into submission.