Terrorists don't eat carrots

The Bush administration is abandoning its policy against giving in to nuclear blackmail. It is now going along with the European Union in offering economic incentives to Iran in the hopes the terrorist regime will see the light and abandon its quest for nuclear weapons.

Haven't we been here before?

Oh, wait! It was North Korea where that was tried that before. Our mistake.

Perhaps the Bush administration's mistake, too. You can't feed a shark salad in the hopes it becomes a vegetarian.

Neither can you appease crazy, antisocial terrorist leaders ñ for very long, anyway. The Clinton administration's sad attempt to buy off North Korea in the 1990s failed miserably: No amount of humanitarian aid or other concessions was enough to forestall Kim Jong Il's bloodthirst.

We fear it is dubious, if not outright dangerous, for the United States to fall in line and to follow Europe's crack Appeasement Regiment into Tehran.

Who knows? Maybe it will work. Maybe Iran's admission into the World Trade Organization and other incentives will derail Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Again, we are highly skeptical.

But even if it does work for a time, North Korea has shown that such agreements can be frighteningly ephemeral. Moreover, can you imagine Iran being able to leverage World Trade Organization policies against the Great Satan?

More importantly, rewarding nuclear blackmail only encourages more of it. If Iran, after North Korea, gets paid a ransom for merely announcing, then renouncing, nuclear ambitions, who's next? Anyone with a dirty bomb will be looking for a paycheck.

Nor does the Iranian regime deserve the legitimacy and propping up that Europe, and now the United States, would give it.

Nearly 60 airline passengers of Iranian origin made that point dramatically this past week by staging a peaceful sit-in on a Lufthansa plane at the Brussels airport.

"We all ask the leaders of the European Union (not to) support the regime in Iran," said one of the young Iranian protesters.

He's right.

Iran doesn't need to be bought off, it needs to be isolated. Yet, this past week, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was in Venezuela finalizing an economic development pact with another despotic regime.

The civilized world simply has

to do a better job of isolating terrorists and the regimes that support them. If Saddam Hussein had been truly isolated ñ instead of bought off with U.N. oil-for-food money ñ that war might not have been necessary.

Some sticks are more peaceable than others.

Yet, sticks are what is called for.

Terrorist regimes do not understand or respect carrots. At whatever point Iranian leaders develop a distaste for the West's carrots, all deals are off.