Ahmadinejad as Putin. His chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei

"Iran needs to remove the mullahs from power once for all," it read, "and return to a great civilization without the Arab-style clerics who have tainted and destroyed the country for the past 31 years."

An interview with Mashaei in The New Yorker


Polling the US

It’s an oddly phrased question, but one which nevertheless indicates pretty strongly that Americans are not in favor of a U.S. war with Iran. I suspect that those who are in favor of a war with Iran understand this, which is why they like to talk exclusively about “air strikes,” “military strikes,” or my favorite, “surgical strikes.”
Last month’s Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll showed that Americans “were about evenly divided” on the question of whether the U.S. should undertake “military strikes” on Iran as a last resort, after diplomatic and sanctions efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program had been exhausted. It would be interesting to see how those numbers change if “military strikes” was changed to “war.”
Because war is what it would be.