Please. She is so smart, on such a wide range of subjects, it’s a rare pleasure to read her.

It’s my home town paper, but still, a piece like this is really an embarrassment. Maybe that’s why the Slimes’ circulation is dropping so fast? Let’s hope.

The author, Reza Azlan, yearns for rapprochement between the United States and Iran. He knows that it will not be easy, after all,

for that to happen, Iran will have to meet certain conditions. It must stop sending arms to Hezbollah. It must cease meddling in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it must pursue a more constructive role in stabilizing Iraq

.

Not to mention the two major problems: the nuclear program and the Iranian practice of killing Americans and/or taking Americans hostage. It’s hard to rapproche with people who are killing, kidnaping and torturing you, all the while planning to nuke you as quickly as they can.

But, according to Azlan, these Iranian practices are America’s fault, the fault of our “policy of actively pursuing regime change in Iran.”

Azlan blames our regime-change policy for all the bad things the mullahs do:

This policy has only strengthened the hand of Iran’s clerical regime, accelerated its nuclear program, helped justify its repression of political opposition and fostered its paranoia against internal and external threats.

The problem is that there is no such policy. It exists only in the minds of people who refuse to look in front of their noses, preferring to search the secrets of their navels. Two consecutive secretaries of state have forcefully rejected regime change. Powell said he didn’t want to get involved in what he called the Iranians’ internal “family squabble.” And Rice said we didn’t want regime change, but only a change in the regime’s behavior. No American president has ever proclaimed regime change to be the objective of our national policy, and no document has been approved that authorizes regime change.

I guess the fact checkers are on strike at the LA Slimes…