Iran presents the US with complex problems but the sterile rhetoric of the Bush administration remains firmly in the past
Iran presents a complex problem for the White House, which requires a multi-faceted response. That apparently obvious observation is the single most important difference between the Obama and Bush administrations' approaches.
Obama is trying to deploy the tools he has available military deployments to counter missile launches, the threat of (effective) multilateral sanctions or (less effective) unilateral sanctions, the still-open possibility of nuclear talks and the distant possibility of improvements in bilateral relations that ordinary Iranians ardently desire to offer a coherent choice to an Iranian regime that is itself apparently incapable of presenting coherent policy choices on the international scene.