This makes Russ Feingold look rather silly, I think:

Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, in Ames Thursday, raked the Republican administration for fighting a war in Iraq and also blamed the war on growing tensions between the U.S. and Iran over its nuclear energy program.

"We made the situation in Iran worse," Feingold told a packed audience of Iowa State University students, Ames residents and local politicians in the Maintenance Shop in ISU's Memorial Union. "They took this period to develop nuclear capacity."

Feingold said since fighting in Iraq, the United States is in a weaker military and diplomatic position. He said the U.S. should respond by persuading Iran to "back off on nuclear weapons" rather than with military threats.

"It's a far better approach than warmongering," he said.

Where to begin. How about Feingold's suggestion that invading Iraq had anything to do with Iran's decision to "develop nuclear capacity." Iran's nuclear program, including its parallel clandestine operation to develop nuclear weapons, far predates March 2003. Is Feingold arguing Iran wouldn't have taken the period of the last three years to develop nuclear capacity if we hadn't toppled Saddam? That is, to put it mildly, frighteningly naive.

So is the notion that we're going to persuade Iran to "back off on nuclear weapons" by taking the military option off the table. The White House has let the Europeans negotiate until they were blue in the face, it has offered grand bargains, direct talks, and it has worked dilligently through the United Nations, all the while making clear that a military strike is a highly unlikely, though still viable, last resort. That is far from warmongering.

Iran has thumbed its nose at the international community's every offer, how Feingold thinks that a policy of more carrots and less stick is going to magically convince Iran to give up its decades long ambition to acquire a nuclear weapon is beyond me.