The most appalling part to this is that it is Iranian law and both legally and morally they would lay claim to being in the right.The problem is how to change a system that has obtained for over fourteen hundred years? At the same time the West has willfully ignored similar practices in Saudi Arabia.

It is not sufficient merely to institute regime change,the social and cultural mores of the Middle East would have to be restructured.

This however is where we came in,it is exactly what the Islamic fundamentallists are fighting against.

It is also against the tenet of multiculturalism which grips the liberal elite.

So does the West fight the the Jihadis into oblivion, encourage less aggressive and moderate regimes where we can or do we modernise the Middle East root and branch?

I do not find the latter option plausible except in a time scale of decades,because essentially it means that the US has to pick up the imperial burden.The Middle East has always been fertile soil for prophets and knife waving fanatics centuries before Imperial Rome,the solution has always been the same,military occupation.