I haven't been writing much about this tool. Partly it's because he thinks that Hamas isn't intransigent, that Iranian Jews feel safe, and that pragmatists are ascendant in Iran - and I'm just not sure how a post with only the words no, no, and no over and over again would play.

But more it's because he's just taking dictation from the Iran Lobbyists inside and outside the administration. Since those guys are going on the record elsewhere, Cohen's basically just a particularly venomous anti-Israel NYT stringer. Which doesn't seem like a good deal for him: if he became a reporter and moved to the Beirut bureau he could publish his editorials on the front page. Maybe he's worried that he'd have less room to suck up to his de facto ghostwriters by publicly campaigning for anti-Israel partisans to get administration posts. You can see how that would be a problem.

Still - come on:

Any such [Grand Bargain] is a game changer, transformative as Nixon to China (another repressive state with a poor human rights record). It can be derailed any time by an attack from Israel, which has made clear it won't accept virtual nuclear power status for Iran, despite its own nonvirtual nuclear warheads. "Israel would be utterly crazy to attack Iran," ElBaradei said. "I worry about it. If you bomb, you will turn the region into a ball of fire and put Iran on a crash course for nuclear weapons with the support of the whole Muslim world." To avoid that nightmare Obama will have to get tougher with Israel than any U.S. president in recent years. It's time.

This is an ostensibly objective human being sitting down, furrowing his brow, and concluding that - given the choice between buttressing an ally or shielding that ally's genocidal enemy - we should undermine our friends and protect our enemies. And to think that some conservatives have turned "they're not anti-war, they're just on the other side" into a catchphrase about the foreign policy left.

And no, of course negotiations won't work:

At the beginning of the year, George H.W. Bush offered an olive branch to Tehran, declaring in his inaugural address, "Good will begets good will. Good faith can be a spiral that endlessly moves on." The mood grew more euphoric in Europe. In 1992, the German government, ever eager for new business opportunities and arguing that trade could moderate the Islamic Republic, launched its own engagement initiative. It didn't work. While U.S. and European policy makers draw distinctions between reformers and hard-liners in the Islamic Republic, the difference between the two is style, not substance... The EU took the bait and, between 2000 and 2005, nearly tripled trade with Iran. It was a ruse. Iranian officials were as insincere as European diplomats were greedy, gullible or both. Iranian officials now acknowledge that Tehran invested the benefits reaped into its nuclear program.

Cohen and his ilk have been promising for decades that Western gestures would be met with Iranian moderation. That's turned out to be the exact opposite of true. I'm not sure how Cohen would explain that little brainteaser, but I bet it would have something to do with Israel.

And yes - but for Godwin's Law the title of this post would have included the phrase "play Czechoslovakia to Ahmadinejad's Germany." But rules are rules. Although I'm not sure why we have to hold up our end when the NYT is publishing this tripe side by side with their "What About All The Good Things Hitler Did" articles.