I have never declared that the leadership in Tehran is "stupid." But I am quite convinced that this leadership is comprised of apocalyptic zealots, who wish to hasten the return of the long-departed Twelfth Iman; and the only way to do so is to engulf the world in an unimaginable conflagration.

Those who are accustomed to viewing all national leaders as calculating, pragmatic types--as people who carefully analyze the cost-benefit calculus, according to a Western-style thought process--are typically incapable of imagining what quasi-religious zealots are capable of doing.

The zealots are not at all stupid; in fact, they are not even irrational. They simply operate on a very different level--a supra-rational level, which rejects both rationality and irrationality. So they are infinitely more dangerous than, say, a Kim Jong-Il, who merely wishes to perpetuate his own power; or a Leonid Brezhnev, who, in the 1970s and early '80s (prior to his death) wished to advance the interests of the USSR.

As deeply as I despise the Nazis--and it would be almost impossible for me to overstate my hatred of the evil ideology spawned by Mein Kampf--I will have to admit that a German soldier, in WWII, who shot and killed an American soldier, was doing nothing dishonorable. The same in WWI. These were examples of a warrior under one banner killing a warrior under an opposing banner. But non-uniformed insurgents who detonate roadside bombs are surely not warriors, in any meaningful sense of the word. What they do is far from honorable. No, it can accurately be defined as murder.

As for the suggestion that we "take US soldiers out of the fray," Iran was never a part of that "fray" when the US entered Iraq in March 2003. (The Iran-Iraq War had already been over for 15 years.) So Iran has no dog in this hunt, as the Southern provincialism goes--unless, of course, Tehran wishes to act opportunistically, in the most cynical possible way.