But Jingus, you're ignoring the fact that Iran was quite helpful initially with the war in Afghanistan and offered huge diplomatic concessions to the US in 2003.  The Bush administration's ridiculous approach to Iran fucked all this up, and it all went down the drain in 2005 with the election of the hardline conservative Ahmadinejad (with the Iranian public probably driven toward support of this douchebag by the Bush administration's rhetoric).  Now we have two hardline administrations in place and have seen absolutely zero progress on the nuclear issue in the past years. 
  
No serious foreign policy analyst--liberal internationalist, realist, whatever--thinks that the Bush/McCain approach to diplomacy with Iran is the right one.  That's why you see crazy shit like Republican Senators Lugar and Hagel endorsing Obama's foreign policy.