From TruthDig
By Tad Daley

Any New Yorker will tell you that the best views of Manhattan are to be found not on the island, but from across the water. The most sublime commentator on the workings of democracy in America, it is often argued, was not from America, but Europe–Alexis de Tocqueville, in his majestic work by that very title. The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped many breathtaking photographs of wondrous spiral galaxies millions of light years away, but no human has ever held such a perspective on our own spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, because no human (nor even any human artifact) has ever viewed it from the outside.

The greatest insight into a difficult and complex matter often comes from an outside observer. In late February the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that Iran had accelerated rather than suspended its uranium enrichment activities. Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking from Australia, immediately warned Tehran, All options are still on the table. Two days later Cheney suddenly showed up, publicly unannounced, in Pakistan, setting off a flurry of talk radio and Internet speculation that the true purpose of the visit was to negotiate flyover rights for an impending air assault on Iran. In response, an Iranian deputy foreign minister stated, We’re prepared for any situation–even for war.

To the dismay and astonishment of the peace and progressive Democratic base that swept the party back into power last November, the three early front-runners for the 2008 presidential nomination–Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards–have consistently expressed a similar hawkishness on Iran. Clinton and Edwards have even uttered the identical all options on the table phrase!

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