The Europeans are starting to show that they're finally serious about the Iranian nuclear program, and they appear to be willing to use sticks against Iran. So I think it is imperative that the United States sit down with the Europeans and say, "Let's make this very clear to the Iranians. Either they can give up their nuclear program and their support for terrorism, in which case we'll given them all kinds of benefits. Otherwise, we'll join in comprehensive, multilateral sanctions that will cripple their very fragile economy."

More likely, there were probably some real divisions within the Iranian government - some groups wanted to ally with al Qaeda against us, others didn't want to have anything to do with that. So I think that debate resulted in no decision being made for awhile. The problem was they left the al-Qaeda folks in Iran in the hands of their intelligence services and Revolutionary Guard, who didn't really keep an eye on them - and may not have kept an eye on them on purpose.

Iran uses terrorism very instrumentally as an element of foreign policy; they are not just intent on just killing as many people as possible, like al Qaeda. There's no reason to believe that would change.

It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars.

The Europeans are starting to show that they're finally serious about the Iranian nuclear program, and they appear to be willing to use sticks against Iran. So I think it is imperative that the United States sit down with the Europeans and say, "Let's make this very clear to the Iranians. Either they can give up their nuclear program and their support for terrorism, in which case we'll given them all kinds of benefits. Otherwise, we'll join in comprehensive, multilateral sanctions that will cripple their very fragile economy."

The Iranians are very skilled terrorist, and we'd have to expect that they'd hit at us as hard as they could. Especially in Iraq, where they have a great deal of power and influence.

The US has just consistently tried to ignore Iran. And this is ironic because the Iranians believe that the United States is as obsessed about them as they are about us.