Thanks, Philip, for the martyrdom operation of enduring that fawning and preposterous ritual which seems to have been Mike Wallace’s interview with the Devil’s version of Ringo Starr. One of the casualties of being without television is missing these segments for the ages. Iran is quite clearly a monster state in a way not even North Korea, in its fuddy-duddy condition of insularity, can accomplish. Pyongyang is but the mad laboratory in the world’s basement.

And people are kidding themselves if they think that any of this would be acceptable or even more acceptable with Saddam Hussein carrying on. I suppose the same wicked Americans who supported Iraq against Iran while they duked it out in the eighties are nothing at all like modern critics who would look so well on a Sunni-Shia nuclear arms race rather than what we have now? Events threaten to outpace a levelheaded digestion of our memories of them. I take a dip here on the Iranian impact upon a judgment of failure in Iraq. We all need a plunge of disciplined remembrance.