Recently, the American Chairman of the Joint Chief Chiefs of Staff, General Dempsey, said that the Iranian Regime is rational. It is rational….Absolutely! -- but within its own Iranian context of rational -- not ours.
The current leaders of Iran, according to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, are dangerous. When he ruled Iran, he did his best to keep them out of government: he knew Iran's current rulers believe that by provoking a conflagration, they would try to make their Mahdi -- their messiah - return.
Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), which worked against the Soviets, will not work here. Iran's current rulers --- most prominently the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Iran's fake "Grand Ayatollah" leader, Khamane'i, who has the formal rank of Hojat al-Islam -- a rank far below that of Grand Ayatollah, but he "crowned himself" Grand Ayatollah, like an African dictator, after he took over his country -- also adopted the title General, and believes that when their messiah arrives, this messiah will make clear that their form of Islam -- not Sunnism, or for that matter, any non-Muslim religion -- are all perversions of the one and only true faith -- theirs -- which itself is a perversion of mainline Shi'ism.
Destruction, for Iran's rulers, is an inducement, not a deterrent. From the point of view of Iran's rulers, provoking a conflagration is eminently rational. But it is somehow hard to believe that this is what General Dempsey had in mind when he said the Iranian regime is rational.
