Hillary Clinton tried to play nice with an Iranian minister at a security conference in Bahrain and got slapped in the face for her trouble:

The Secretary of State had a rare chance to interact with Iran's foreign minister at a Bahrain security conference, where Clinton urged Tehran to engage with the international community over its nuclear program at talks next week in Geneva. But while her speech from the podium directly addressed the Iranian team led by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, her attempt at a more personal touch fell distinctly flat.

"I got up to leave and he was sitting a couple of seats down from me and shaking people's hands and he saw me and he stopped and began to turn away," Clinton told reporters on her plane back to Washington Saturday.

"I said 'Hello, minister.' He just turned away."

At a news conference Saturday, Mottaki denied the reported slight, saying he had been greeting King Abdullah of Jordan at the moment Clinton spoke to him. He said he had returned her greeting.

[...]

Mottaki, for one, didn't seem destabilized in the least by Clinton's entreaties. While the U.S. secretary of state laid out her case for broader Iranian engagement, Mottaki concentrated on his dinner -- giving no sign that Washington's latest message to Tehran had been heard.

The idea that this crew running our foreign policy still haven't figured out the utter futility in trying to be nice to the thugs in Iran is incomprehensible - until you remember that they believe it's our fault that relations are at such a low point.

Being slapped in the face is only what we deserve, according to them. No doubt this will continue until the grown ups are back in charge of our foreign policy.