“Iran is one of the most talked about countries on America’s foreign-policy fixations. It’s also one of the least understood. That’s not a stretch: anything east of Gibraltar these days seems misunderstood, stereotyped or worse, which goes a long way to explain the sort of mess we’re in in the United States: the Bush years add up to an intentional snub of a world it never attempted to understand, let alone deal with, except from the barrel of a gun. Or at least a barrel-full of preconceptions.”
