The second great lesson is that when crazy people with political power tell you what they're going to do -- believe them. They're not kidding.

Herbert E. Meyer discusses A Dose of Real-World Intel on Iran

What is the issue with Iran and the bomb?

Study the history of Nazi Germany, and you'll discover there were quite a few Jews who could have gotten out safely in 1936, 1937, and even into 1938. But they decided to stay. Some of these Jews who chose to remain in Germany were professionals -- for instance, physicians and architects. Others owned businesses such as department stores and factories. They had beautiful homes, good lines of credit with their bankers in Frankfurt and Zurich, perhaps season tickets to the Berlin Philharmonic. They would meet, talk, and assure one another that things really weren't as bleak as they seemed: "Look, these Nazis are distasteful and maybe a bit nuts. But what are they going to do? Kill us all?" As a matter of fact -- yes, that is precisely what the Nazis did. Even worse, Hitler and his murderous gang of Nazis made no secret of what they had in store for the Jews. Indeed, they never shut up about what they had in mind. But what they said they planned to do was so horrific, so utterly beyond rational imagination, that too many Jews simply didn't believe them until it was too late to escape.

Iran's leaders, like the Nazis before them, are a bunch of genocidal lunatics. They are the world's leading sponsors of terrorism, they slaughter their own people every day, and in just the last month they've described Israel as a "cancerous tumor" that needs to be wiped out, while asserting that Israel's very existence is "an insult to all humanity."

The Jewish people won't make the same mistake a second time. They won't wait patiently for Iran to get its hands on a nuclear bomb and then annihilate another six million of them.