Noam Chomsky has, as usual, a radical idea: democracy promotion.

After noting the obvious conflict between Bush administration policy and the popular will, as expressed in the last election, he joins the chorus in pointing out that bullying from the US is likely to stiffen Iranian resistance, given our history.

Doubtless Iran’s government merits harsh condemnation, including for its recent actions that have inflamed the crisis. It is, however, useful to ask how we would act if Iran had invaded and occupied Canada and Mexico and was arresting US government representatives there on the grounds that they were resisting the Iranian occupation (called “liberation,” of course). Imagine as well that Iran was deploying massive naval forces in the Caribbean and issuing credible threats to launch a wave of attacks against a vast range of sites — nuclear and otherwise — in the United States, if the US government did not immediately terminate all its nuclear energy programs (and, naturally, dismantle all its nuclear weapons). Suppose that all of this happened after Iran had overthrown the government of the U.S. and installed a vicious tyrant (as the US did to Iran in 1953), then later supported a Russian invasion of the US that killed millions of people (just as the US supported Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980, killing hundreds of thousands of Iranians, a figure comparable to millions of Americans). Would we watch quietly?

Of course we wouldn’t. But that would be different; that would be us.

The real pisser is that neither the Americans nor the Iranians appear to favor the confrontational approach their governments are taking.

Surely no sane person wants Iran (or any nation) to develop nuclear weapons. A reasonable resolution of the present crisis would permit Iran to develop nuclear energy, in accord with its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but not nuclear weapons. Is that outcome feasible? It would be, given one condition: that the US and Iran were functioning democratic societies in which public opinion had a significant impact on public policy.

As it happens, this solution has overwhelming support among Iranians and Americans, who generally are in agreement on nuclear issues. The Iranian-American consensus includes the complete elimination of nuclear weapons everywhere (82 percent of Americans); if that cannot yet be achieved because of elite opposition, then at least a “nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East that would include both Islamic countries and Israel” (71 percent of Americans).

Seventy-five percent of Americans prefer building better relations with Iran to threats of force. In brief, if public opinion were to have a significant influence on state policy in the US and Iran, resolution of the crisis might be at hand, along with much more far-reaching solutions to the global nuclear conundrum.

To me it seems clear that the solution begins with the US living up to its own commitments in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and starting to reduce its stockpile of nuclear weapons rather than producing a new generation of them.

No doubt such a solution will be dismissed out of hand by Clinton, Richardson, Biden, Dodd, and all the Responsible Democrats. But it would work, I betcha.