What if They Don't Want Carrots?

On Sunday, President-elect Barack Obama once again waded into the treacherous waters of U.S.-Iran relations without the benefit of some understanding of who Iranians are, and how they might respond to a certain kind of language (employed in public). Language that may seem perfectly reasonable to us, but when heard on the other side of the world, provokes, as the Iranians have put it in the past, an "allergic" reaction.

Obama suggested on Meet the Press that U.S. policy towards Iran would involve