Here are my reasons for being friendy (ier?) with Iran:
1. it is a real country with a real culture and its not going away.
2. Its people are some of the most "modernized" (in the deep sense of the word) in the entire region and already are, and will be, a force to be reckoned with in that region.
3. Its cultural influence extends well beyond its borders and is a huge step above the cultural influence US ally Saudi Arabia has been peddling in the region for the last few decades.
4. Its regime is not crazy. They certainly don't "hate us and everything we stand for" with anything approaching the hatred the average Wahabi or even the average ISI officer feels for "everything we stand for".
5. I dont take their rhetoric too seriously..its not meaningless, but they are not as crazy as they sometimes sound.
6. There ARE truly dangerous people in that regime (dangerous most of all for their own countrymen and neighbors, less for for faraway United States) but so, there are dangerous people in the Pakistani and Saudi and Whatever regimes and the US manages to work with them or around them or even through them.
7. "Friends" may not be the first step, but a lot can be done before that stage is reached. irrational enmity is not a good policy.

and so on....we can agree to disagree.