Heckuva Job, Brownie

Surely assuaging concerns in D.C. that he wouldn't be as useful a tool as his predecessor Tony Blair, new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has evidently decided to prove his mettle as a fearless lapdog by being as belligerent as his Beltway masters:

[Brown, holding his first Downing Street press conference,] said Monday that tougher sanctions are likely against Iran over its contested nuclear program and declined to reject outright the prospect of future military action.

…"I'm not one who is going forward to say we rule out any particular form of action," Brown said, asked if he would rule out options for future military action against Iran.

…He said Britain would "take whatever measures are necessary to strengthen the sanctions regime in the future."

The US and the UK continue to fear that "Tehran is using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to produce atomic weapons," and Iran has not quelled those fears as they've now twice rejected UN Security Council resolutions "requiring it to halt uranium enrichment work." On the other hand, the "International Atomic Energy Agency said this month that Iran has scaled back its uranium enrichment program, signaling a possible willingness from Tehran to resolve the international deadlock," so perhaps now would be a good time to engage some of that famous British diplomacy instead of barking about tougher sanctions and issuing veiled threats about military action, which will necessarily be viewed through the lens of Britain's alliance with the US, where the administration is presumed to want war in Iran as a follow-up to their grand Iraq adventure.

I don't give Ahmadinejad, who's clearly crazier than a shithouse rat, the benefit of the doubt for a second, nor Ali Khamenei, who's sane but a tyrannical bully, but I'm getting extremely tired of a foreign policy that's got all the nuance of a dick-measuring contest. I'd really appreciate it if we could can the fucking bravado and start behaving like grown-ups for awhile.