Normally I don't edit what I'm typing but I started off the title of this response with "You're an idiot Lee". I don't want that thought to be the sum of my response (which it would be from the shock value) because your illogical response deserves a discussion.

Lee, tell me any time in history where a country engaged in arming an insurgency and didn't get caught doing it. Although your thought briefly entered my mind, logic quickly took over and moved my head into the future past a week or even a month.

Let's say the Green Party or whatever they're calling themselves become armed to the teeth and somehow managed to engage the ruling party.

Basically, you have a civil war, a bloody, destructive one, the type that causes millions of refugees to stream across borders trying to escape the carnage.

Oil prices climb to $200 a barrel. Are you prepared for the economic damage that would cause a world already on the brink?

The action of the United States arming the insurgents is brought to light no matter how clandestine we attempt to keep things. The radical Islamic crowd in Iran uses that to stir the fence-sitters to go to their side because of the normal human emotion of pushing back against foreign interference in the matters of one's homeland.

Weapons, once they go into a country, remain there. We might want to look back at our arming the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan and how the weapons, money, and training we gave to what became the Taliban and Al-Quaeda came back to bite us.

Look, we're all sympathetic to the young and (ironically more liberal) group opposing the powers to be in Iran but it's their fight. Only a natural evolution there will cause the change you're looking for and it will never be all you desire. The culture is way too different to anything that will suit your taste.

Even if the election had gone the way most of us desired, Iran would still have been a difficult place to deal with. If Ahmadinejad grossly stole this election as it appears and proof of that allegation becomes well known to the Iranian public he will be a marked leader and will actually have lost influence in the world and among his countrymen. Maybe the longer he remains in office, the sooner the Iranian society evolves away from that brand of fanaticism.

Lee, resist you inclination to look for overnight fixes to complex problems. They never work.

Art