ARTICLE: "Can U.S. Force Iran's hand Despite a Lack of Support?" by Neil King Jr. and Glenn Simpson, Wall Street Journal, 16 August 2007, p. A5.

As I said recently, I have no problem with America designating Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. Call a spade a spade.

The problem, as this piece points out, is that the Guards basically have no commercial contact with the U.S., so sanctions here will have little impact. The Guards basically reflect the larger reality once bemoaned by Bush himself: by isolating Iran so much over the years, we don't have much leverage with them.

The countries that do have leverage are China, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and India. None are particularly incentivized to follow our suit. They lack our myopic focus on WMD (they find it baffling when we pardon such sins from our friends like India and Israel and Pakistan and reward authoritarian regimes throughout the Persian Gulf with lotsa arms deals whenever we damn well please) and they don't see us offering strategic offsets they believe might temper the situation sufficiently (like our non-effort on a regional security dialogue that must include Iran; after all, we had an OSCE that included all sorts of states that sponsored terrorism, to include the USSR, East Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, etc--all of whom fostered all sorts of nefarious behavior throughout the world with their security programs across the Cold War).

So we continue teaching ourselves new lessons in the non-efficacy of isolating enemies in an increasingly connected world. If the enemies in question cut themselves off on their own, like a North Korea, that's a different subject. But Iran's been smart enough not to do that, hence our sense of futility.