Scenes from a marriage

"The lesson they took from Iraq is that there should have been more troops on the ground" -- an impossibility in Iran, because of the overextension of American forces in Iraq -- " so the air war in Iran will be one of overwhelming force".

"If you engage a superpower, you feel you are a superpower...And now the haggling in the Persian bazaar begins. We are negotiating over a carpet" -- the suspected [nuclear] weapons program -- "that we're not sure exists, and that we don't want to exist. And if at the end there never was a carpet it'll be the negotiation of the century".

-- respectively, a government consultant with ties to the Pentagon and Giandomienico Picco, as quoted by Seymour Hersh in Last Stand