“We should privatize the sanctions against Iran by launching a worldwide divestment campaign,” John McCain said in his AIPAC speech, “As more people, businesses, pension funds, and financial institutions across the world divest from companies doing business with Iran, the radical elite who run that country will become even more unpopular than they are already.” And then down comes Sam Stein pointing out that McCain’s top strategist Charlie Black has been lobbying on behalf of Iran-linked firms:

But, as demonstrated by the CNOOC anecdote, if choking off Tehran’s economic lifeblood is McCain’s goal, he could have personally started down that road years ago — with his own advisers.

But beyond the narrow hypocrisy point, the real moral of the story here is just to remind us of the limited practicality of a sanctions and divestment approach to Iran. In a highly globalized economy, it’s difficult to try to hermetically seal off Iran economically. You start divesting from firms that do business with Iran, but then you still have firms that do business with firms that do business with Iran. Divest all you like, but Iran still has oil that people want to buy, which gives Iranians money they want to use to buy things with. Which isn’t to say that economic pressure is totally ineffective, but how effective it is has a lot to do with how wide the network of pressuring entities is. A really global sanctions and divestment campaign can deliver enormous blows, while unilateral measures are difficult to really enforce in a serious way.

This is one of several reasons why there needs to be a good-faith negotiations component to dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. On the one hand, we ought to recognize the limited utility of coercion alone in changing Iranian behavior. And on the other hand, as we seek coercive measures, or credible threats of coercion, we need to make the coercing coalition as broad as possible and to do that we need to be seen by world opinion as approaching this subject in a serious way. Ultimately, international consensus against the idea of an Iranian nuclear weapon is the only way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and to preserve and strengthen that consensus we need to act reasonably. Ideally, reasonable U.S. behavior will be met by reasonable Iranian behavior. If it’s not, then reasonable U.S. behavior will set the stage for international cooperation that, unlike the all-bluster approach favored by conservatives, might actually accomplish something.

Good work, Joe Lieberman; Good work, AIPAC. Here’s John Hagee on the antichrist:

Hagee assures us that the Antichrist will be a homosexual who’s also “partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler, as was Karl Marx.” Where Hagee got the idea that Hitler was Jewish, I couldn’t quite say, but it seems that in the eyes of this “pro-Israel” (in the sense of urging Israel to start wars that he believes will lead to its destruction) leader, all evil stems from the Jews. Here’s the website of the World Congress of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Jews so we can keeps tabs on them — look for the Antichrist to emerge out of this website.

This whole business about the leader of the Pakistani Taliban running loose and making public appearances in Pakistan under the terms of a very lenient accommodation Pervez Musharraf reached with him kind of seems like a problem. I’m not sure statements like “there can be no deal with the United States” should necessarily be taken at face value, but it’s clearly cause for concern.

Now I don’t think withdrawing a couple of brigades from Iraq and throwing them into Pakistan is necessarily the correct way to express that concern, but given that the Afghanistan-Pakistan area is where our biggest problem seems to be, it would be nice for that region — rather than Iraq — to be the main focus of not only our material resources but perhaps most importantly of the time and attention of folks at CENTCOM, the NSC, the White House and so forth. Instead, this whole area is getting treated like an afterthought.

Tom Friedman says we can’t negotiate with Iran yet because we don’t have enough leverage. We need to get the leverage first, and then we talk. Mostly, I find this whole line of argument wrongheaded for the reasons David Shorr outlines.

But we also need to get real here for a moment and recognize that we’re the United States of America and despite the damage Bush has done we have plenty of leverage. We’re a giant rich country and they’re a medium sized middle income country. We have military forces in two of Iran’s neighbors, we maintain sanctions on Iran that hurt their economy. Our closest ally in the country is a rich nation with a power military establishment and nuclear weapons, their closest allies in the region are non-state militia groups. We have plenty to offer Iran that would be valuable to them insofar as they’re willing to change their behavior in ways that are valuable to us. That’s all the leverage you need to start a process of negotiation.