The Iranians can't even muster enough respect for Obama to let him send envoys to debase themselves in front of the mullahs. The administration wanted to dispatch Kerry to Tehran in the midst of the most recent crackdown, a move naturally seen as a shameless betrayal by the Iranian dissidents being beaten and shot and run over by basij cars. Nope.

Pathetic:

Iranian legislators on Sunday decided to not allow a visit from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), according to Iranian media. "Members of the Iranian parliament's Foreign Relations Committee (a subcommittee of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission) voiced opposition to the request after studying the issue," Hassan Ebrahimi, head of the committee, told the semi-official Fars News Agency. Several Iranian news outlets reported last week that Kerry had submitted an official request to visit Tehran in an emissary role... On Saturday, Iranian legislators stepped up the rhetoric against the news that Kerry was considering traveling to Tehran with the blessing of the White House.

At least we're not also trading top Iranian-backed Iraqi terrorists for British computer specialists who were brutally kidnapped while tracing exactly how Iran interferes in Iraqi affairs. The raid that captured the specialist involved the kidnap of four British body guards who were later executed - bound - with bullets to the head. Which is exactly how Khazali's gang murdered the American soldiers they had kidnapped in a separate raid:

So mind-bendingly insane is this that I thought Roggio might have been duped by his sources. Not so: Both the Guardian and now Jake Tapper have independently confirmed that it's true. Remember Qais Khazali?... He used to be an al-Sadr deputy, then broke away and hooked up with Iran to start his own little mini-Hezbollah. That group, the "League of the Righteous," ended up pulling off one of the most notorious, sophisticated anti-American operations of the Iraq war in Karbala. The toll: Five Americans murdered, four of them after they were kidnapped, bound, and shot in the head like animals. U.S. troops caught up to Khazali... Petraeus ... accused Iran's Quds Force -- the creme de la creme of the Revolutionary Guard, responsible for assisting Iranian proxy jihadis like Hezbollah in other countries -- of bankrolling the whole thing. And now, after three years in U.S. custody, he's free.

Obama wanted to send the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to Tehran to - what? Explain how there's no hard feelings about the whole "brutalizing their people and executing our captured soldiers" thing? Insist that we're willing to look the other way if they'll pretend to think about maybe not laughing at our threats of toothless sanctions?

And they wouldn't even let us go through the motions of groveling to them.

Remember when conservatives ridiculed "smart power" as a faux sophisticated excuse for US obsequiousness? And the left said that conservatives were thoughtless warmongers and - in fact - Obama was going to restore America's dignity and respect? That's definitely the sense I'm getting from this gambit. Dignity. And. Respect.

References and related after the jump...