This little article by Nancy Zuckerbrod at the Washington Post has the stuff that panic is made of, not that I’m recommending panic.

“What we want to do is open a dialogue,” Obama told the BBC. “You know, there are misapprehensions about the West, on the part of the Muslim world. And, obviously, there are some big misapprehensions about the Muslim world when it comes to those of us in the West.”

Obama says that Tehran has legitimate interest in nuclear energy (at least they know how efficient energy is obtained). You see, dialogue is the way forward with people who deny the holocaust. Maybe we could talk them into believing that it happened as well as out of the desire to destroy Israel.

“Although I don’t want to put artificial time tables on that process, we do want to make sure that, by the end of this year, we’ve actually seen a serious process move forward. And I think that we can measure whether or not the Iranians are serious,” Obama said.

It appears that whatever does or doesn’t happen before the end of the year, Iran will move forward anyway as they’ve been saying all along. And then what? Will the head and hands of Dialogue fall on the floor, and Obama have some sort of backbone to do something about it?

He said he hoped to deliver the message that democratic values are principles that “they can embrace and affirm.”

Obama added that there is a danger “when the United States, or any country, thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture.”

We can’t simply impose, and we can’t simply dialogue either without plans to follow up when they refuse. And by follow up I don’t mean another so-called preemptive war, but rather defense measures. We will need the offense of a strong and productive economy free from government control and ruin.