Thomas Friedman has lost his mind

That's right. The venerable New York Times columnist has lost his mind. That's the only way you can explain his advice to Barak Obama to "channel Dick Cheney." I provide the relevant quote:

There is a cold war in the Middle East today between America and Iran, and until and unless it gets resolved, I see Iran using its proxies, its chess pieces — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and the Shiite militias in Iraq — to stymie America and its allies across the region.

And that brings me back to the Obama-Cheney ticket: When it comes to how best to deal with Iran, each has half a policy — but if you actually put them together, they’d add up to an ideal U.S. strategy for Iran. Dare I say, they complete each other.

Vice President Cheney is the hawk-eating hawk, who regularly swoops down and declares that the U.S. will not permit Iran to develop a nuclear weapon. Trust me, the Iranians take his threats seriously.

...

“For coercive diplomacy to work you need to be able to threaten what the regime values most — its own survival,” said the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Robert Litwak, author of the book “Regime Change.” “But for coercive diplomacy to work, you also need to be ready to take yes for an answer.”

Mr. Obama, by contrast, has “yes” down pat. As he said on “Meet the Press” last week: “I would meet directly with the leadership in Iran. I believe that we have not exhausted the diplomatic efforts that could be required to resolve some of these problems — them developing nuclear weapons, them supporting terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas.”

...

But Mr. Obama’s stress on engaging Iran, while a useful antidote to the Bush boycott policy, is not sufficient. Mr. Obama evinces little feel for generating the leverage you’d need to make such diplomacy work. When negotiating with murderous regimes like Iran’s or Syria’s, you want Tony Soprano by your side, not Big Bird. Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.

Here is the problem. First, if you are going to threaten to use violence, you have to be ready to follow through on it. I'm not a firearm owner, but I've been told that if you point a weapon at another person, you must be prepared to use it should the situation require it. As I discussed previously, there is no circumstance under which the use of military force against Iran would produce a positive result for the United States. So to continue the metaphor of a firearm, informed policy makers are unwilling to use the weapon (and therefore should not point it) and those willing to use the weapon will have it blow up in their face. Second, coercive diplomacy also requires that there is a point, as the 'thumb screw' of pressure induced by increasinly urgent threats of military violence, at which the target policy makers will capitulate rather than face war. But in Iran, the leadership is strengthened by external threats of violence, not weakened. Ahmadinejad and his government knows that a full on invasion is impossible, so they do not fear for their own survival or for the survival for their state (even if they did, the example st by Iraq is probably strong enough to salve those fears). Any damage done by military strikes would be superficial, easily paid for at today's high oil prices, and would serve to rally a public that would otherwise be critical of the government behind their leaders. In this situation, coercive diplomacy would fail. Either the US will have to back down, offering a domestic coup for Ahmadinejad and further damaging US standing internationally by making it look like a bully. And Ahmadinejad would continue to do as he liked. The only way to deal with Iran is to bring international pressure to bear. That Friedman doesn't understand this, after his own mistakes in judgment in the run up to the Iraq war, is a shame. The public needs educated, thoughtful commentary on foreign issues, and there are many cases where Friedman does this, but here he is egregiously wrong.