On Sunday’s GPS with Fareed Zakaria, neoconservative guest Reuel Marc Gerecht responded to arguments that an attack on Iran would rally the Iranian people behind their government:

“But I think within a… fairly short period of time in Iran, what you would have happen is that all the Iranians would probably say, you know, down with the attack. I mean, that’s just going to be the instinctive reaction. But within a very short period of time—Iranians aren’t simple folk. They’re very sophisticated, and their complaints and criticisms and hostility toward the regime is longstanding, that you’ll start to see in fact questioning of the competence of this regime. Why did it lead to, in fact, a military strike by either the United States or, much more probable, Israel?”

Either Gerecht thinks the Iranian people are a hell of a lot more sophisticated than the American people, or he just doesn’t “get” the patriotism thing.

I mean, it took a majority of the American people several years to decide the Iraq war had been a “mistake,” even when the U.S. government had flat out lied its way into  war.   On the other hand, Iran is not in fact in violation of the IAEA regime, and public impressions to the contrary stem mainly from the American cable news networks repeating the American government line as straight news.