Chief among Barack Obama's attractions to American voters last year - albeit one not acknowledged in polite company - was his promise to engage diplomatic contact with Iran. Sick of the endless bog of war in the Middle East that remains President Bush's "gift" that keeps on giving, Americans wanted desperately to avoid spreading battlefronts to Iraq's big, restive neighbor to the east.

Obama stuck to his proposal that it was better to talk than shoot, even though he faced considerable slings and arrows both from the John McCain campaign and our all-knowing media shamans, for whom all options toward Iran should forever remain on the green table of military strategem.

Despite, however, relentless propaganda that has Iran seeking nuclear arms with which to roast the world, a New York Times poll last month that asked, "Do you think the United States should or should not establish diplomatic relations with Iran while Iran has a nuclear program?", was answered affirmatively by 53 percent of respondents; the hardline "should not" faction, meanwhile, retreated to 37 percent.

OK. That's where we are. So... why yet aren't there direct talks between us and the existentially threatening Persian them?

At a New York event this week, covered by the Christian Science Monitor with the ominous headline "Is Diplomacy With Iran Futile?", guests voted "American Idol"-keypad style on the proposal that engagement was going nowhere - and rejected it by 59 percent. Seems we still want to give peace a chance, even if one attendee had doubts:

A surprise guest at the debate was the father of the only female debater. Dick Cheney kept mum during the event, but at a dinner afterward, he congratulated the teams for a provocative debate. "If diplomacy can work, of course we should try it," he said. He then added that he didn't think it could, because "our partners" are less intent on preventing a nuclear Iran than on restraining America from using military force. 

That's an a approach a little softer than Cheney's usual bayonet-fixing. "If diplomacy can work, of course we should try it." Jeepers! I was always told, and remember noting in "My Weekly Reader", that while success in any venture is never assured, failure is guaranteed unless we make an effort -  something the Bush-Cheney regime consistently refused to do whenever diplomacy was an option. Who knows what would have happened had the Bush Administration accepted Iran's offers of strategic aid post-9/11? Certainly, no love was lost between Iran and Saddam, and none now between Tehran and the Taliban, which the Iranians consider for themselves something of a Sunni "existential threat". Truth was, Cheney and the neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon always had Iran next on their regime-change lists, back in the day when these deluded fools thought they could remake the map of the Middle East - and clobber reality itself - with push-button war toys and other people's lives.

I asked (then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas) Feith about the prospects for a few specific countries besides Iraq. Might there be regime change in Iran, for example? "Sure," he said. "Sure. Not every government that falls around the world is connected to the war on terrorism. There were governments falling for millennia--before the United States came along, before the war on terrorism. There are all kinds of reasons that governments fall... Would he be willing to say anything about the future of the government of Syria, which may be the world's leading haven for terrorist organizations, since it openly plays host to Islamic Jihad, in Damascus, and Hezbollah, in Lebanon? He smiled. "Not on the record," he said.

We all know how that turned out. And certainly the long-dead in unexpectedly fierce, open engagements that ripped through Iraqi cities like Fallujah and Baghdad know, too. If we had any fantasies of perp-walking the Arab Mideast to democracy, they lie now bloated and stinking as the long, on-going insurgency tears at the Fertile Crescent.

Given that background of hubris and failure, folks are quick to notice that we aren't exactly racing to the table to jawbone with the Iranians, to keep that disastrous military option safely packed away. And a figure has emerged to embody our sporadic urge to poison anew relations with Tehran: Dennis Ross.

When it was announced earlier this year that Ross would be sort of a roving "ambassador-at-large" go-to guy for that part of South Asia outside Iran, peaceniks breathed a sigh of relief. Ross, who has solid ties with Israel-centric political groups, was credited during the Clinton years with skewing that administration's Levant peace initatives to benefit Israel exclusively; Ross has a single, chronic explanation for the failure of any accords between the region's relentlessly allergic camps - It's all the Palestinians' fault. Diminishing his role in Obama's new approaches with Iran might give the efforts a chance to actually, you know, work. But things change: 

According to some observers, the advisor appointment was a considerably lower ranked post than Ross had coveted. However, although not given a "special envoy" rank like George Mitchell (the Obama administration's special envoy to the Middle East), Ross' post includes a portfolio on Iran, a country towards which Ross has a track record of pushing hardline policies... Because of his hawkish track record on Iran, which includes endorsing a 2008 report by the Bipartisan Policy Center described by one observer as a "roadmap to war" with Iran, Ross' appointment was harshly criticized in some quarters. Elaheh Koolaee, a former member of the Iranian Parliament and a professor at Tehran University, told the Inter Press Service, "Some people in Iran or in the Middle East may be under the impression that Obama's promise of change in U.S. foreign policy may have a far reaching extent. ... Mr. Ross' appointment shows a continuation of existing U.S. foreign policy in the region, not a change."

All that renewed prominence in the Iranian portfolio emerged over the past few months, a kind-of evolution of same-old, same-old re-injecting itself in U.S.-Iranian relations. It appears now that Ross was slipped into the fold by deliberate stealth. Washington Note blogger and frequent TPM contributor Steve Clemons wrote at the time of Ross' initial appointment that a high-profile posting:

...Would provide too much fodder for the populist campaign of President Ahmadinejad who is up for election in June and be seen by Iran as a sign that Obama was not serious about a strategic leap out of the current US-Iran relations mess into a different arrangement...  AIPAC will not be overjoyed with the seeming demotion of Dennis Ross' position -- but they also like the fact that he did get an appointment inside the tent.

Forget about the Iranian jackass - the perennial loudmouth of Persia - how about the big swatch of us concerned Americans - over here - worried that an unyielding Israel-Lobby hack like Ross has been emplaced specifically to harpoon any serious chances at rapprochement with Tehran? First he's a figurehead, then, by increments, he's Our Man for Iran.

We know Israel considers Iran a dangerous threat, a rogue nation set on developing the kind of vast nuclear arsenal already cached in countries like, well, Israel. We know the Israelis have been threatening to attack by air Iran's nuclear facilities and "weapons research" sites. The IAEA protests that no evidence exists for an Iranian weapons program, our own National Intelligence Estimate (the latest one, in the Bush years!) says they're not sparking up Armageddon - all to no avail. Because Israel and its domestic Lobby want something done (militarily, if possible) to send a message to the Muslim Middle East, and lash them back into place, it will be done - America's interests be damned.

The dance steps of this shadowy jig could be discerned over the course of the last few weeks, first with an announcement, apparently originating with Ross, that the President would give Iran a deadline of this fall to meet demands for nuclear stand-down, or sanctions will be applied. That was followed up by denials of a deadline from the White House. In his talks with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu last week, Obama applied a soft "review" of progress for the end of the year. Then,

...In the same AP report, "U.S. officials" said Iran probably "won't get until the end of the year," and they pointed out that (Secretary of State Hillary) Clinton told lawmakers last Wednesday that "the strategy which we are laying out does have a time frame." The AP also called Ross the administration's "point man on Iran" and resurrected his claims about a fall timetable. [Source]

Pro-Israel hawks - whether neoconservative or liberal interventionist - are pushing hard to sling Iran on the wall, and end it's viability as nemesis of Israel; mostly fabricated tales of Tehran's nuclear ambition are just the pretext, a latter-day 9/11 to be used the same way the New York tragedy was hijacked as impetus to launch the thoroughly unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003. Powerful interests want America immersed in yet another everlasting, faraway conflict in which this nation, this world - regardless of the prattle - have no strategic stakes. This obsession with Iran is Israel's problem, and, bluntly, Israel's troubles aren't mine. 

But helping along the case for international "jump-in", of course, would be some violent attack by Iran on Americans or "American interests". There have been eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations in the Gulf and Straits of Hormuz between the two nations' navies for years now - squabbles that have all the comic nature of schoolyard preening and harassment if lethal hardware weren't so integral to the picture. If Iran can be pushed far enough, maybe it will strike back militarily. And then, it's on: The long-held wet dream of bunker-busting can begin, and a stifled, subservient Middle East realized. A bombing in a remote Iranian city yesterday killed 20, and has a stench of foreign provocation about it, certainly that's what Iran thinks.

...And given the absurdly fraudulent campaign for the last endless war, I'm not so sure myself.