Please don't use that word to describe contradictory or two-faced situations. Some journalist got it wrong decades ago and it's taken off.

Schizophrenic is like the street people who think that aliens or the CIA are controlling their thoughts or are spying on them or whatever. They are detached from reality. People with mild schizophrenia live around us and take meds to keep the symptoms down. But when it gets bad, they start hallucinating events that never happened and they get paranoid of their friends and relatives. Now, ok, that too could describe members of the current administration. But just stay away from the word to avoid confusion.

then india, which fought a couple of wars with pakistan. then pakistan which supported and controlled the taliban and is currently blowing up shiite mosques. are you surprised that iran wants a bomb? it's not against the U.S. and it's not against israel. and they won't let terrorists have it. why? they *have* a state - and they like it the way it is, intact. if i were given a choice, i'd rather the U.S. have sole possession of the bomb. why? i live here and it's unlikely the U.S. will bomb its own territory. but is it worth fighting over? i say no. iran is not a threat. pakistan is more of a threat. in fact a "mexican" standoff between iran and pakistan has a lot to recommend it. back to the subject. the only country that didn't receive (american) complaints about developing the bomb was the only country that didn't need it - china. why?

If they want to jack us on crude oil then let's quintuple the price of their food and gasoline (of which they import 80%). May they starve and freeze in the dark, Allahu Akbar Mullahfukaz.

But seriously, the regime isn't going away in your lifetime. Few Iranians have a living memory of the Shah. They aren't going to spontaneously rise up and overthrow anyone. And why should we care? They have as much to worry about from India, Pakistan, China, Russia their REAL nuclear neighbors than they do from us. And if they choose to deplete their capital by pursuing a nuclear weapons program in lieu of industrial and societal capital than who are we to complain about it? Let it crash in flames. Let them wander around dazed the next time an earthquake levels a city of 50,000 people because they couldn't be bothered updating their building codes since the 13th Century. That works for me. Hey as long as they have a glittery big bomb they can threaten their neighbors with and eat at the big table with the grown ups.

We need not make the same mistake with them as we did with the Soviets. Back in the late 1950's official US estimates pegged the Soviet economy at 70% the size of the US, growing at 5.8%/year scheduled to become larger than the US economy around 1980. In retrospect this was abject silliness. The Soviet economy after around 1956 was either flat or slightly backwards. It was never more than 51% the size of the American economy and by the end of the so called Golden Era of World Communism, around 1980, the year they were projected to outstrip us, they were on a permanent downward spiral to collapse. They made the decision to build a huge army, a very large air force, a middling navy and a huge strategic nuclear missile force. At the expense of just about everything else.

For instance, did you know that the precursor to LASIK, the technique of surgically scribing the cornea to improve vision was a Soviet invention. Do you know why? Because Doctors were cheap, so cheap in fact it was cheaper to operate than to try to build eyeglass factories. Have you ever seen a Lada car? A tube of Soviet toothpaste?

No we need not obsess on Iran. They will fail the same way you don't see the Muslim (Arabic/Farsi/SW Asian) world exporting a good washing machine. In 30 years the demographic pyramid will distort out of control and there will be few people able to work to support the massive number of people under the age of 16. Some estimates put that group at more than 75% of the total population. There won't be enough people to work. Which is fine really because Iran seems to be unable, with about 20-22% unemployment now, to even find enough jobs for the workforce today.

Tell us how that works out President Wingnutjihad. Good luck with that. We'll be over here synthesizing cardiac arteries and curing Alzheimers. You stay over there figuring out how to make the world's best IED.

"But in the meantime, the nuclear issue appears to be taking on new urgency, with International Atomic Energy Agency leader Mohamed ElBaradei -- who is hardly a Bush booster -- warning in mid-May that the Iranians have advanced their ability to enrich uranium"

What is missing from this statement is the grade of Uranium Iran has on hand. You need a different kind of uranium to enrich for Nuclear power than for weapons, and once uranium is enriched for Nuclear power it cannot be used for nuclear weapons and vice versa. A friend of ours who is a physicist told us before we invaded Iraq that the uranium in the Iraq case was not nuclear weapon grade and CIA should have known that. So Iran has enriched a lot of uranium and is stock piling for future power needs. They need to buy a different grade of uranium to enrich it for Nuclear weapons.

I find it pretty incredible that the U.S condems other nations when we are going to fund replacing out atomic warheads with Hydrogen warheads.

Trends in Iran: 70% of population under 30, getting more and more frustrated by the geriatric theocracy. (Remember that this population has actually had to live under the kind of regime that Muslim fundamentalists merely aspire to. The Iranians know what it's like.) It is well-documented that they hate the moral policing, the dress code, the banning of Western music, the attempts to curtail internet access.....and they are adept at finding ways round it. The authorities are increasingly worried by this, and certain factions are urging a more liberal interpretation of say, the dress code. Many blind eyes are turned.

So....be patient; don't threaten (only unites young and old against the 'Great Satan' who young Iranians normally admire. And by the way, the largest Iranian population outside Iran is in California); establish as many business links as possible (Iranians have a long mercantile tradition); continue to influence through third parties - Syria, Europe, whomever; rely on Sunni Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia to take steps too. And calm down.