On Fareed Zakaria’s show this morning, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski drew a fascinating parallel between American Neocons and the Iranian regime:

In Iran, we have two different forces at work. You have those who are for more democracy but who are also nationalistic and you have those who are supporting the regime who in many respects are … very similar to our Neocons. They are Manichean, they look at the world as divided into Good and Evil and many of them see America as the personification of Evil…

[Obama] has struck exactly the right note. He’s offering moral sympathy, he’s identifying himself morally and historically with what is happening in Iran but he’s not engaging himself politically, he’s not interfering, because that would turn out badly and it could be exploited by the Neocons in Iran to crush the revolution, to wipe it out. I don’t know if the revolution will prevail, it may take time, but the longer it lasts the better are its chances. But we don’t want it to escalate into a total showdown because if there’s a total showdown now, the chances are that the worst elements, the Iranian Neocons, will prevail.