What’s next for Evan Bayh — taking Noam Scheiber’s advice?

Moderates must insist…that Democrats won’t win back the White House unless they convince voters to trust them on national security, which means making the war on terrorism not just the party’s top priority but its central preoccupation in 2008. We’re not just talking about calling for a larger military, but something dramatic to signify the shift–like a plan to strike an Iranian or North Korean nuclear facility if need be.

Or does he plan to just stop with hurting people in Iran in a slower and quieter way?

Even as the notion of sweeping sanctions was being discounted, however, the administration also came under pressure on Thursday to move quickly toward such penalties. Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, a leading Democrat, announced that he would shortly introduce a resolution calling for just such a step.

"We have wasted valuable time, diverted resources and ignored this problem at our peril," Mr. Bayh said, noting that he supports a ban on gasoline sales to Iran and other economic punishments. "No one wants to forestall the need to use military force more than I do, but if we are to do so, we must act now."

I guess that’s what they mean by "getting to the right of the Bush administration on Iran."

I hope this doesn’t get to be a fad, because agreeing with Bush, while grumbling over Democrats’ statements, really messes up my instincts. Today’s NYT reports that the administration has pretty much written off sweeping sanctions on the sensible grounds that they would hurt ordinary people in Iraq, causing them to rally around their leaders.  I’m not so sure about that. Sanctions certainly caused enormous suffering in Iraq, but I don’t think Iraqis exactly rallied around Saddam. They didn’t overthrow him in their misery either. But I’m glad that somebody in this administration finally figured out that deliberately making people miserable in the hope that they’ll blame the guy in charge — as we did in Iraq — is both inhumane and counterproductive. Now I just wish they’d figure out that anything you do to make a country feel vulnerable cements its relationship with its leaders.

Frightened people will rally around vicious and crazy leaders? Yeah, we have some recent experience with that phenomenon , don’t we?

As long as sanctions are really targeted at leaders, I don’t have any objections to them, but I honestly don’t see what they could accomplish either. There is one interesting suggestion, though:

American and European experts on Iran say corruption is a major problem and many Iranian leaders have foreign bank accounts, though they are in Europe and not the United States. Eventually, if negotiations fail to stop Iran from enriching uranium or taking other steps opposed by the West, European countries might act against those accounts, various diplomats said.

Yesterday I linked to Iranian human rights advocate Shirin Ebadi’s wise essay in the LA Times, in which she argues for focusing more attention on Iran’s human rights and anti-democracy record than its nuclear plans. She’s not talking about overthrowing the Iranian government and planting a "democracy" (yeah, we’ve had some experience with the efficacy of that recently, too) but with supporting, or at least not undercutting, human rights and democracy advocates within the country. Maybe there are downsides I haven’t thought through yet, but it seems to me that exposing corruption — and I know, the US is not in a position to point fingers here — fits in comfortably with what she’s talking about.