Saw hardliner Woolsey testify with Thomas Pickering on Iran-as-threat to Lantos' House committee. He is hard, but very intelligent and very persuasive. We shared a panel once at the Arlington Institute and I liked him personally despite all the differences. My favorite bit on him shows the huge gap in our interpretations on Iran. He compared Khatami to Kosygin (nice, but useless), and then compared Rafsanjani to... Andropov! I loved the comparison, seeing the completed unfolding of my recent column (Andropov was the man most responsible for Gorbachev's rise). Woolsey, of course, meant the comparison as a complete downer (the beginning of the apocalypse), while I saw it as pure opportunity. Woolsey surprised me, because after he testified that Iran would basically get the bomb no matter what we'd do and that it would very likely use it immediately to attack Israel, America, and much of the world, he quickly followed up that stunningly dire assessment by arguing for a soft kill with support to dissident groups and an RFL/RL effort on the regime. His rationale? The military option wasn't particularly feasible/effective, so that's our best mid-term option. I was a bit stunned: even after arguing a diametrically opposed view of Iran from my own, he came to a conclusion I've got no problem with, except he rules out any formal talks with Tehran (although he had no problem with informal ones--when pressed by Ackerman, whom I like). When I heard Woolsey say that, I realized that I've never really argued for or against formal talks. To me, even my original proposal to send Baker implied that quasi-official-with-no-official-obligations-made approach. And when I realized that, it dawned upon me that Woolsey and I are not very far apart on dealing with Iran near term. And that felt weird...