Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, in an interview with Time, admits the benefits of the Iraq War for the Iranian regime. Priceless.

"I don't know what President Bush, the father, would have done. But I know that eliminating Saddam [Hussein] has been to our benefit, to the benefit of Iran."

Check out the interview. Confirms my belief that the brilliance and terrifying insidiousness of despots like Khatami remains their ability to use the language of the West--the rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and human rights--to critique the West's excesses, while their own regimes not only violate these same values, but explicitly refuse to graft them into their political systems. It's laughable, actually, that a regime that has sponsored art exhibits glorifying the Holocaust would challenge the West to combat on the level of democratic and humanitarian values. But they know how easily people in the West dissatisfied with the Bush/Blair Administrations will sympathize with this language. Nasrallah becomes Che, Hamas the revolutionary defenders of the oppressed...