It is much easier to believe that people hate you because of something you did than because of something you are.

Ahmadinejad needs to be taken down…hard.

At best, appeasement means we let Iran turn Iraq and Lebanon into puppet states and, in return, they term limit Ahmadinejad, hand over a few token terrorists, and stop the reactors. This will produce great rejoicing because Disaster Has Been Averted.

Of course, it also means they start up the reactors again and put a new loonie in a high-profile position when Saudi Arabia finally collapses and they want a slice.

This will be followed a few years later by agreeing to stop their biowarfare research in return for a halt in oil-shale research …

Most important of all, other nations have been taking notes and are considering how to use pretended insanity as a bargaining chip.

And nobody in the League of Nations suspected the extent of Hitler’s army, until he started using it. In fact, many members declared that Germany had every right to rearm itself.

Just like many UN leaders say Iran has every right to build nuclear weapons.

Iran is managing to supply modern enough weapons to destroy Israeli Merkavas and US Abrams. I think historians are going to look back on the fully equipped and modernized Iranian army, and wonder how we could have been so stupid as to ignore them, let alone supply them ourselves to “make things fair.”

Never again. But if again, not just us this time.

If the Israelis asked me, and there are good reasons why they don’t, I’d suggest they let the Moslem world know that if anyone launches an a-bomb at Israel, whether it lands or not, it will be a thousand years before anyone can safely visit Mecca and Qom.

On the other hand, you ask: would the Moslems accept the destruction of their most holy places if it meant killing a few million Jews? Alas, the answer isn’t obvious.

Also, Hitler built up a huge modern army. A lot of Iran’s weaponry dates to the days of the Shah, and Iran spends less on defense than either Israel or Saudi Arabia. Hitler never made a serious peace offer to the allies, either, though the Iranians offered a serious diplomatic arrangement to America in 2003.

“Iran covets the oil reserves of southeastern Iraq, southern Azerbaijan, and northwestern Saudi Arabia.” Iran is going to invade Azerbaijan? This isn’t even serious.

A good refutaion of the idea that Iran is seriously working to become the Middle Eastern Hegemon, or that they’re hellbent on nuking Israel, is here: http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009588.php

Ahmadinejad is an incredibly nasty piece of work, but if Iran builds a nuclear bomb the main problem is that Iran could sponsor terrorist groups like Hizbullah much more aggresively. That’s a very bad thing, but not the end of the world. Israel’s existence is not at stake.

BTW, I read the Foreign Policy article “A World Without Israel”. Despite the smart-alleck title, it was a good article. The author was trying to refute the Israel-bashers who blame Israel for all the Middle East’s problems by asking what the other Middle East countries might be like today if Israel hadn’t been created and concluding that they wouldn’t be much different than they are now. (Naturally, some other experts disagreed.)

This is what the Arabs wanted all along, you know… a replay of the Six-Day War, only with Israel prevented from striking the first blow. Without that, her destruction would have been assured in 1967, and this is how both Europe and the Middle East intend to destroy her today.

I wish there was something I could do to help, but anything other than what I’ve been doing (donating more money than is fiscally prudent) would be more a burden than a benefit.

Iran is very dangerous, for the reasons cited above, and because the US will do nothing to halt Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.