Using tragic quake to restart U.S.-Iran relationship.

The devastating earthquake that rocked Iran on December 26, 2003 left tens of thousands dead and thousands more homeless. President Bush responded to the tragedy by airlifting humanitarian aid to the stricken country. The president said the aid was a sign of compassion, not a message that he wants warmer ties with Tehran. "What we're doing in Iran is we're showing the Iranian people [that] the American people care, that they've got great compassion for human suffering," he said in an interview from his ranch in Texas.

However, like Team Clinton before it, Team Bush has been flirting with normalizing relations with Tehran since taking over the White House. The current humanitarian overture appears to be merely a prelude to that normalization effort with the infamous member of the "Axis of Evil." The Bush administration point man in this effort has been Secretary of State Colin Powell, who has publicly floated the prospect of renewed U.S.-Iran ties several times over the past few years. Claiming to see "a new attitude in Iran," Secretary Powell said in a Washington Post interview on December 29 that there "are things happening and therefore we should keep open the possibility of dialogue at an appropriate point in the future."

America's foreign policy establishment, as epitomized by the Council on Foreign Relations, has been claiming to see change and reform in the Iranian regime for more than a decade. With the election of President Khatami in 1997, that chores has been claiming to see more moderation in Tehran, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. CFR "experts" such as Richard W. Murphy and Gary Sick have been advocating restoring relations with the terror regime that were terminated in 1979 when Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Secretary Powell and many of his State Department underlings are members of the CFR.

President Khatami is no moderate or reformer. A U.S. Senate report on terrorism points out that Khatami presided over a secret 1984 meeting in Tehran to form an international terror brigade. He has played a central role in directing Iran's global terror operations over the past two decades, using subordinate terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO.