...In many occasions, Westerners assume that everybody in the world shares their standard behavior; basically they project their mentality onto all counterparts. And here is where, in the case of Iran, they dramatically fail. The Islamist establishment that unfortunately today governs that country is not interested in making the best possible deal with the West. Its only interest is the destruction of the infidels and their corrupt world.

While in the West the act of engagement is absolutely neutral, and doesn’t imply giving in, but simply to sit down and negotiate, in the mentality of the mullahs to engage basically means that the counterpart proposing engagement feels weak, and tries to beg for a deal from an inferior position.

That was evident during a function organized in July 2004 by the Council of Foreign Relations, where Mr. Brzezinski was proposing engagement with the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Haa’eri (not the Ha’eri that is part and parcel of the coterie of the Mullahs and is sitting in Qom, but the one who has been defrocked and lives between the U.S. and Germany), a Shia scholar forced to exile because favors a secularized version of Shi’itism, and miraculously still alive after several attempts on his life in Germany, was among the public, and was given the opportunity to speak. Ayatollah Haa’eri strongly instructed Brzezinski and his fellow panelists that engaging the mullahs would simply embolden their aspirations to destroy the West, because in their mind they would smell a weak adversary prepared to make concessions. Among the people present to the CFR function, the Iranians understood perfectly what Haa’eri was saying, while most Westerners were smiling with an air of superiority, not believing a word of what they were hearing, convinced that Haa’eri was a bitter character, unable to extricate himself from his grudges as a defrocked Mullah. This is the origin of the deep sense of frustration that we feel when confronting cultural imperialism: no matter how loud we scream, no matter how eloquent and based on facts is our arguing that the mullahs must be confronted, not courted, Islam absolutely secularized, separating religion from state, the same way westerners aspire to live, our plea falls on deaf ears. Westerners deem to know better, even if the subject matter is our land, our culture and, ultimately, us.

Another sad example is the recent book by Ken Pollack titled “The Persian Puzzle.” Mr. Pollack shows an encyclopedic knowledge of Iran and its history, definitely he knows more than even many of the well-educated Iranians. Yet, in spite of all his knowledge, he fails to grasp the basic concept that the only way to deal with the Islamist threat is to actively pursue regime change in Tehran; anything short of that is simply postponing the inevitable showdown, which will occur sooner or later. The sooner the better for the West, which would confront a regime that doesn’t have yet a nuclear arsenal at his disposal.

Mr. Pollack, (like the journalist, Arnaud de Borchgrave) naively and unfortunately propose instead dialogue and a diplomatic solution, once again projecting their western mentality onto interlocutors that behave according to different systems of belief and standards...