"In spite of the NIE findings, Bush and the wider U.S. establishment still share a view of Iran as evil and unapproachable.... Congress and the media's so-what response to the Bush administration's outrageous attempt to cook the Iran intelligence does not inspire confidence....
Bush has gotten a pass on his deception yet again for a simple reason: America views Iran as so innately dangerous, irrational and undeterrable that it doesn't care that Bush lied about what he knew and when he knew it.
In the eyes of the mainstream media, Congress and much of the public, Iran is the ultimate bad guy, a combination of al-Qaida and Adolf Hitler....
One of the reasons the NIE is so politically sensitive is that it is really not about whether a nuclear Iran threatens America but about whether it threatens Israel. The Israel connection makes it extremely difficult for any U.S. politician to advocate anything other than a confrontational stance with Iran.... few analysts and politicians have tried to determine whether Bush's claim that Ahmadinejad wants to destroy Israel is actually true, whether Ahmadinejad would have the power to launch such an attack even if he wanted to, and whether Iran would pursue a policy that it knows would lead to its immediate and complete destruction.
In Parsi's view, the Iranian regime is neither evil nor irrational. It is not primarily driven by religious or anti-Israeli ideology but by national self-interest. It is prepared to do just about anything, except abandon Islam, to maximize its regional power and preserve itself. It is a bitter enemy of Israel, but the enmity is based on geopolitics, not ideology, and it is prepared to make peace with Israel in return for strategic gains. Indeed, it has made many pragmatic overtures to both the U.S. and Israel; four years ago, it made an astonishing peace offer to Washington, which the Bush administration rejected out of hand....
One of Parsi's more remarkable tales takes place in May 2003, just after U.S. troops occupied Baghdad. Fearing that the U.S. was about to invade Tehran, Iran approached the U.S. with an amazing offer. In a dialogue of "mutual respect," it offered to stop its backing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, support the transformation of Hezbollah into a disarmed political party, open up its nuclear program to international inspection and accept the Arab League's two-state plan for Israel and Palestine, thus making peace with the Jewish state. In return, Tehran asked for the U.S. to abandon its plans to topple the reign of the mullahs, end sanctions, turn over antiregime terrorists and accept Iran's legitimate interests in the region....
the discussion was immediately stopped by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "We don't speak to evil," they said....
Some respected Israeli analysts share Parsi's view. Parsi quotes Israel's former Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami as saying that "Iran is not driven by an obsession to destroy Israel, but by its determination to preserve its regime...
Haaretz analyst Zvi Bar'el takes the same view, arguing in a piece titled "They Stole the Threat From Us" that "Iran is indeed deceptive, but it is not crazy. It operates according to a systematic political and diplomatic rationale."
But the dominant view of Iran, in both Israel and the United States, continues to be that it is a mad regime bent on destroying Israel. Haaretz reporter Shmuel Rosner wrote that "observers from the right and left have told Haaretz that the report released a week ago on Iran halting its nuclear program will have no impact on U.S. public opinion or its effect will erode."
