My inbox over the past few days has been absolutely inundated with emails from people from all over the world who took time out of their busy lives to denounce me as "crazy," "delusional," and, my personal favorite, "smoking the good stuff." What got so many people fired up and so eager to diagnose my mental health was my article "How Iran Could Whip the U.S. and Israel without Firing a Single Shot." In that article I made the suggestion that the Iranians have the ability to avoid conflict with the U.S. and Israel by doing exactly what is demanded of them. Instead of allowing themselves to be dragged into a bloody war with two of the most powerful nations in the history of the world, I suggested that the Iranians hold a trump card that will allow them to escape that outcome by abandoning their nuclear program in toto. This suggestion, according to many people who wrote to me, is a sign that I have fallen off my rocker.

Before anyone runs out to secure a court order to have me committed (or drug tested), allow me to make some additional observations in defense of my argument.

The first thing that I would note is that my argument is really just a different way of saying that the Iranian government can and will try to avoid a brutal and bloody war with two of the most heavily armed countries in the history of the world. Duh. They will try to avoid this outcome not because they particularly care about the wellbeing of their citizens, (of course they don’t, they’re politicians after all), but because they are acutely aware that wars with the United States eventually result in "regime change." Two of their neighboring governments were overthrown by the U.S. military in just the last ten years, despite the fact that those governments had nothing to do with 9-11 and did not attack the United States, and they just watched the U.S. help to overthrow the Libyan government. Surely the Iranian government is aware that war with the U.S. and Israel will produce a similar outcome for themselves. If they are foolish enough to allow a war to develop, they would have to assume that would meet a fate similar to Saddam Hussein or Mullah Omar.