Stephen Kinzer just returned from a trip to Iran and reports:

The first thing that strikes Americans who visit Iran is how amazingly pro-American its people are. Nowhere else in the Middle East, nowhere else in the Muslim world, and almost nowhere else on earth do people so unreservedly admire the United States. Opinion surveys confirm this phenomenon, and I remembered it from previous visits. Nonetheless it was disorienting, in the heart of the purported axis of evil, to to be surrounded, as I was at Imam Square in Isfahan, by giddy female college students shrieking “We love America so much!” At a Persian garden in Kashan, I met a solemn elder whose only English phrase is “America very good,” and who pronounced it with grave reverence.

As he writes, that sentiment — and I don’t pretend to know how widespread it truly is — is a strategic asset against the Iranian regime. Jeopardizing it by attacking Iran, as the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the U.S. recently floated, would be the height of folly. And for that matter, the U.S. (and perhaps Israel) would have way more to lose from a military strike than the UAE would. Reprisal against U.S. or Israeli interests is more likely than against Emirati interests, even if those latter interests pose a softer target.