Originally Posted by pjohns

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.