ARTICLE: Oil, Ideology Keep China From Joining Push Against Iran, By John Pomfret, Washington Post, September 30, 2009

They've existed for quite some time, and frankly, I find them more impressive than Iran's reach for nukes as a sign that Tehran has already broken into the ranks of the untouchable great powers--in terms of kinetic, hard-kill options, that is.

That's why the collective intelligentsia in the U.S. is slowly but inexorably moving toward the soft-kill logic on Iran, made all the more apparent by the democracy movement last summer.

As I have long argued, we are into the Brezhnevian phase of a dead revolution.