Nicholas Schmidle offers an interpretation of the Iranian situation that seems reasonable to me - most Iranians like us, but they wouldn't respond well to the US trying to interfere in their government - this is a lot more believable to me than the Perle/Ledeen argument that the Iranians (like the Iraqis) want nothing else more than they want a US puppet regime, (because they love the US so much that a puppet regime would automatically have great legitimacy).
On the other hand, one of the examples that Mr. Schmidle gave of an Iranian expressing doubts about the US is rather poor, as the Iranian could just be criticizing the US to appease the regime (as they were under surveillance). I suppose mr. Schmidle assumes that the person is critical of both the Iranian regime and the US and that he wantd to make certain that both sides of his criticism were known, but he really never addresses the question of the man's sincerity.
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