I won't go into all of the things I think are wrong with the Truman Show's "progressive battle plan." I will just address the part that deals with Iran policy.

The Iran policy outlined in the plan is laughably unserious, internally incoherent, intellectually dishonest and apparently calculated in advance to fail. You describe it in this way:

So our policy turns on finding ways to use covert action to disrupt the nuclear program, building solidarity with Europe to force Iran to change course through economic sanctions (Europe's economic power in Iran is crucial to that effort), and mounting a public relations campaign aimed at the Iranian people to convince them that their energy needs can be met without a nuclear weapon--and that their leaders are gambling their economic futures in pursuit of nuclear arms.

A few points:

1. It is preposterous to imagine that we can mount a successful public diplomacy campaign directed at the Iranian people while at the same time sanctioning them economically. The latter will produce the very anti-American resentment and swelling of stubborn nationalistic feeling the former is designed to counter.

2. Itanians already believe that "their energy needs can be met without a nuclear weapon." They strongly support a nuclear program that they believe is designed to help meet those energy needs, and which they also believe is not designed to produce a nuclear weapon. So the propaganda campaign will not work unless it succeeds in persuading Iranians that their government is in fact attempting to produce nuclear weapons. This seems unlikely for two reasons: (i) The US doesn't have the goods - if it did it would be using them right now; and (ii) even if the US did have the goods, it probably couldn't persuade anybody - not after Saint Colin's lie-riddled speech to the UN.

3. If you are serious about mounting a covert operation aimed at disrupting a country's nuclear program, you don't begin by saying "our policy is to run a covert operation aimed at disrupting that country's nuclear program."

4. Sabotage of the Iranian nuclear program will be easily recognized as such by the Iranian government, and announced to the world and its own people. The US reputation will be further plunged into the muck as we become widely known as the country that believes in attacking and wrecking the modernizing industrial projects of developing nations, based on half-baked and unproven suspicions that that developing nation might be building a nuclear arsenal with a miniscule fraction of the firepower of the attacking country. Of course, this is a further step toward wrecking your proposed "public relations campaign."

5. Even if one could succeed in convincing Iranians that their government is building a nuclear weapon, that would not necessarily convince Iranians that the government is endangering their security in doing so. The only way you can do that is by simultaneously convincing them that the US is leaning toward attacking them militarily in order to destroy that weapon. But then a good many Iranians are likely to conclude, like the North Koreans, "well then ... I guess it is a damn good thing that my government is building a weapon that can deter the Americans from attacking us!"

6. Even if one could succeed in both convincing Iranians that their government is building a nuclear weapon, and that their government is endangering their security in doing so, that success is likely to have a limited effect. That's because the Iranian people have only a very limited effect on the behavior of their own government. There are real democratic structures in Iran, but they are trumped by the non-democratic structures. The propagand success will have a limited effect, that is, unless ...

7. This policy is really just another version of the Bushian regime change policy aimed at producing a violent and murderous, regime-toppling popular uprising in Iran - based on wishful delusions about a supposedly rabidly pro-American population chafing to the point of revolutionary violence nuder a detested regime. I suspect the only difference between your policy and the Bush policy is that for all your talk about "honest discussions" you guys don't have the guts to state this aim straight out.

The whole policy is rooted in the principle of circumvention of the obvious. Here's what's obvious: Iran's government is in a position to offer us some things that we want. We are in a position to offer Iran's government many things Iran wants. So why don't we explore the options for Pareto improvement? That is, why don't we explore the options for exchanging with Iran things wanted for things wanted in such a way that we both end of better off? Isn't this at least the clear first move?

Yet for some reason most of the Iran policy suggestions that come out of Washington these days, from both parties, argue for pursuing weird convoluted strategies based on creating and maintaining the fiction that the Iranian government doesn't exist, or is hidden behind some sort of shroud of invisibility. It's as though I were to respond to my neighbor storing dangerous fireworks in a shack at the boundary of my wooded property by pretending to look right through the space in which my neighbor is standing, and then sending a messenger halfway around the country to lean on my neighbor's relatives. Why don't I begin by walking next door to my neighbor's house, knocking on the door, and saying "what's it going to take to get you to get rid of those fireworks?"

So here's step one in my own Iran policy proposal: pick up the damn phone, set up a meeting and find out what it will take to get Iran to agree to a failsafe inspection regime and regulatory plan that guarantees its nuclear program is peaceful. Of course, some might be opposed to creating the conditions in which Iran offers a price, because it may turn out to be a reasonable price, from an objective standpoint, and that will wreck the Washington effort to hold out for violent solutions on the grounds that the Iranians can't be dealt with.

Since the Truman Iran plan seems both sophmorically inept and mysteriously convoluted, one has to wonder whether it is just a comedy routine designed in advance to bomb. Perhaps this is the punchline:

As Senator Hart rightly notes, if all these fail, any use of American military force should entail honest and open public debate--precisely what our country failed to ask for in the lead up to Iraq.

Could it be that you want to go through the motions of a stupidly inneffectual Iran policy dance so that when it fails, you can then propose a military solution and say "we tried all the other options?"

Honest and open public debate indeed. This plan reeks of dishonest and secretive public manipulation.