damaging... even when they're trying not to be

For some reason Fred Kaplan's latest at Slate reminds me of that oversized cartoon baby who, despite being a well-intentioned brutish doofball, always managed to cause bodily harm to his playmates.

Condi's Baffling New Iran Strategy - It's guaranteed to hurt the people we want most to help The bigger problem is that U.S. funding will discredit the very people we seek to encourage. Many Iranians, perhaps even a majority, despise their rulers. They yearn for democracy. To a degree unmatched in any other Middle Eastern nation besides Israel, they even like the United States. However, as anyone who knows anything about Iran's history would emphasize, these same Iranians deeply distrust outsiders—including American ones—who try to interfere in their domestic affairs.