If any of their intellectual elite remain alive and unincarcerated, I'm sure they are as embarrassed as I was when Bush hired all those Christian college graduates. I blush to think of it.

I'll take option 3. This kind of talk keeps a certain part of the Iranian population relatively happy/ quiet. That this is also the part most likely to start blowing shit up/ assassinating politicians if they are unhappy also probably contributes.

A common mistake some commit is to assume that Iran is some monolithic political entity, where decision-making goes entirely top-down, emanating from a single source. Often, that source is taken to be A-Jad. Hence, they reason, if Mahmud and a few of his cronies are demonstrably insane, they can put the entire country at risk without concern for the consequences. Both presumptions are false. The bestubbled president, whose close-set eyes eerily remind one of G-Dubs, is only number three in the hierarchy. Even if Iran gets a working nuke, I doubt he'll be the one who gets to hold the atomic football. Second, the Revolutionary Guards and the military elites are less bent on messianic hellfire; decades of plum jobs running corrupt state enterprises makes one fat, lazy, and prone to maintaining the status quo.