John Edwards of North Carolina, a seeker of the Democratic nomination, urges tougher sanctions against Iran coupled with the threat of military force, but undercuts his tough message with the naive suggestion that more blather is the best medicine. This reprises Hillary Clinton's scolding of President Bush for his reluctance to "talk to bad people." The president talks to bad people all the time, but there are limits in what any president can say to them. "You know one of the first rules of warfare is know your enemy," says Hillary, as if affecting her best West Point expertise, "and we're flying blind because we won't sit down and try to figure out what these people really want, who's calling the shots, how we can better deter them."

If Sen. Clinton has been paying attention, she already knows what "these people" really want. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, has been clear enough. He jeers that the annihilation of Israel is at hand, and throws in the United States and Britain for wicked measure.

Bernard Lewis, a keen analyst of the Middle East and Islamic radicalism, told the Israeli conference that the danger from Iran is real, and particularly lethal because the Shiites believe an apocalypse is near. Given the Iranian leadership, "mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent but an inducement." Apocalypse now, on a worldwide scale, edges toward probable.

President Bush made this clear in his State of the Union address, observing that Shia and Sunni radicals seek to kill Americans, kill democracy in the Middle East and develop weapons to subdue everyone else. "Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions," he said. "They want to overthrow moderate governments and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country."

The president, like many of those who yearn to succeed him, is like Jeremiah, an unpopular prophet. But Jeremiah, as ancient Israel learned, knew what he was talking about. There's a lesson here.