John Kerry is the senior Senator of Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He first became known as the volunteer Navy lieutenant who earned numerous medals in active combat in Vietnam, only to become the war's most outspoken veteran dissenter.

In 1985 Kerry won the seat of Massachusetts Senator, and in 2004, he challenged incumbent George W. Bush as the Democratic candidate for President. The successful smear campaign launched by Bush's handlers ("swiftboating") has since become part of mainstream political vocabulary.

Mr. Kerry was instrumental in the Iran-Contra hearings of the 1980's, and in October 2009, held meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to help mediate a runoff election in Afghanistan after reports of ballot fraud. Following the fraudulent elections in Iran the previous summer, Kerry blamed "tough' U.S. rhetoric for pushing reformists like Mohammad Khatami out of influence.

"What comes next in Iran is unclear. What is clear is that the tough talk that Senator McCain advocates got us nowhere for the last eight years. Our saber-rattling only empowered hard-liners and put reformers on the defensive. An Iranian president who advocated a “dialogue among civilizations” and societal reforms was replaced by one who denied the Holocaust and routinely called for the destruction of Israel.

Meanwhile, Iran’s influence in the Middle East expanded and it made considerable progress on its nuclear program.

The last thing we should do is give Mr. Ahmadinejad an opportunity to evoke the 1953 American-sponsored coup, which ousted Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and returned Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to power. Doing so would only allow him to cast himself as a modern-day Mossadegh, standing up for principle against a Western puppet."