News and views on U.S.-Iran relations for February 24:

• National Review Online: Clifford D. May, president of the hawkish Foundation for Defense of Democracies, lashes out at the UN for considering Palestinian requests for a condemnation of Israeli settlement construction. “[W]hy should Palestinians negotiate if they can get the U.N. to force Israel to make concessions in exchange for nothing?” asks May. The UN, says May, is wasting its time when it should be confronting Iran. “Iran’s rulers are executing dissidents daily, developing nuclear weapons, and sending warships through Suez.” He argues that the settlements are really a non-issue, writing, “Hamas, Hezbollah, and the theocratic rulers of Iran have been candid: Creation of a Palestinian state is, at best, a secondary goal. Their primary objective is the defeat and destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.”

• The Heritage Foundation: The Heritage Foundation’s vice president of foreign and defense policy studies, Kim Holmes, blogs that “Obama’s ‘engagement’ strategy toward the ‘Islamic world’ is irrelevant to the Middle East” and that protesters’ demands for “freedom and better standards of living” cause the Obama administration to “launch denunciations with dizzying speed when it is a pro-American dictator like Egypt’s Mubarak, but to delay for days in saying a word when it’s an anti-American thug like Libya’s Qadhafi and Iran’s Ahmadinejad.” He concludes, “If we find Ahmadinejad’s behavior unacceptable, we need to consider options more forceful than talking with ‘multilateral institutions.’”