Today’s New York Times editorial confronts the Bush administration’s “trash talking” of Iran.

Four years after his pointless invasion of Iraq, President Bush still confuses bullying with grand strategy. He refuses to do the hard work of diplomacy — or even acknowledge the disastrous costs of his actions…The world should not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but there is no easy fix here, no daring surgical strike. […]

Large numbers of Iranians are fed up with their government’s corruption and repression and with being branded a pariah state. Rain down American bombs, however, and the mullahs and Iran’s Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are more likely to be turned into national heroes than hung from lampposts.

As The Body Politik has previously pointed out, Iranian reformers and International Atomic Energy Agency chairman Mohammed ElBaradei agree with this assessment. Yesterday, on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, ElBaradei stressed that he has not seen any evidence of an active nuclear program in Iran and encouraged the administration to continue pursuing diplomacy.

I very much have concern about confrontation, building confrontation, Wolf, because that would lead absolutely to a disaster. I see no military solution. The only durable solution is through negotiations and inspections. … My fear if that we continue to escalate from both sides from both sides that we would end up into a precipice, we would end up into an abyss.

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