Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President: what a loathsome lout. Former diplomat Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institute described him aptly: wily, ignorant, smarmy, and not mad, just crazy like a fox. Ahmadinejad ignored CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s question (admittedly easy to do; that girl’s a mess) as to his wipe-Israel-off-the-map routine. Instead, he fixed his dead, beady eyes on the coy Cooper, and shot back with this: “the Zionist regimeâ€?—why can’t anyone criticize it in the US?â€? gormless git. Has he never visited his buds at The American Conservative, Antiwar.com, Counterpunch, A.N.S.W.E.R, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and other tinfoilers, whose views at their tamest represent maybe 13 percent of American opinion? (See this poll from the Phew Research Center. “The Hebraic Bondâ€? will help provide a deeper understating of Americans’ moral affinities. That, and suicide bombings.)
Next, smirking as though he’d come up with something super smart, Iran’s Majnun-in-Chief asked the inept Anderson, “Why don’t they allow more research and studies to be done about [the Holocaust]?â€? For Pete’s sake, hasn’t this fool, with his Ph.D. in traffic and transportation engineering and planning, had an invitation from the Institute for Historical Review, our premier Holocaust denial coven of kooks? They can rattle off reams of “researchersâ€? who’ve dedicated themselves to proving the gas chambers were really Jacuzzis (the sum-total of Fred Leuchter’s “scholarship, for instance).
Or does Ahmadinejad think he’s on to something?
Category Archives: Iran
Default Diplomacy
Diplomacy, not bribery à la Bush, is a good thing, for sure, all the more so if it averts violent confrontation. The goal with Iran ought to be to get IAEA inspectors in there, and have them criss-cross the place—and keep doing so—as they did Iraq before Bush banished them (to wage war, in violation of international and every other law, including natural). Treat Iran’s nuclear facilities like CSI would a crime scene.
But let’s be perfectly clear on who is offering whom a way out. The package of incentives (and disincentives) made to Iran, a pivotal member of Bush’s “axis of evil,” contradicts the Bush Doctrine in every possible way, not least in ignoring the poisonous drip-drip of dissident groups urging action (and that’s a good thing: think Mr. liar-liar-pants-on-fire Chalabi).
By allowing them to front the Iran “deal,” the Europeans have lifted Bush and Rice from the blood-soaked Iraqi soil, dusted them off, and let them save what they lost in “Mess-opotamia”: face.
A way out for Iran? More like a way back in for America.
That Persian Pussycat
It’s official. In case you missed the very gay burlesque, broadcast from Iran, in which a bevy of AhmadiNijinskies pirouetted around canisters of uranium hexaflouride: Iran has enriched uranium.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad broke the news in a ceremony almost as tacky as the last Oscar Awards. He was speaking symbolically from the holy city of Mashad.
That Iran has edged closer to The Bomb does not perturb everyone. Surprisingly, many of those who courageously exposed neoconservative jerry-built justifications for war in Iraq are now fudging the truth about Iran…
Read the complete column, That Persian Pussycat, on WorldNetDaily.com.
The Meta (Perspective) on Mark (Steyn)
Mark Steyn’s essay, “Facing Down Iran: Our lives depend on it,” appears in the Spring-2006 issue of City Journal. The Journal is billed as “the nation’s premier urban-policy magazine… an idea factory” on policy questions.
Let me stipulate for the record that Steyn is an entertaining writer and fun to read. There is, moreover, a great deal that is valuable in this piece—and in his work, in general. However, I don’t think Steyn’s epistolary razzmatazz should be confused with in-depth analysis, or be passed as such in policy-oriented publications.
What do I mean in the context of his Iran run-down?
Just one example: Steyn is courting a confrontation of biblical proportions with Iran. But for me one of the profound questions is this: the West, including the U.S., consists of a bunch of deracinated nations, only relatively free, whose governments are engaged in indoctrinating their respective populations about the twin wonders of Islam and Muslim mass immigration. The Crusaders we are not.
On what philosophical basis, then, does Steyn wish to wage war on a belligerent Muslim country? What are we fighting for if we’ve surrendered already—we’ve welcomed their infiltration of our societies and institutions? (See my expose of this process in the winter issue of The New Individualist)
Surely the real war is at home? Surely the fight for self-determination—individual and national—must be waged against government and its sundering of our sovereignty, individual and national?
Apropos Mark (indirectly, that is), Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, a director of the International Foundation for Election Systems, recently wrote in Times Online: “Increasingly, bodies such as the AEI [American Enterprise Institute] are less keen on sponsoring thinking and research. They are giving desk space and star roles to a breed of fast-talking practitioners of the television soundbite.”
I think it’s fair to say this is a general trend.