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Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?
Conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.
The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.
Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?
When the relatively moderate Mohammed Khatami was elected president in Iran, American conservatives pointed out that he was just a figurehead. Real power, they said (correctly), especially control of the military and police, was wielded by the unelected "Supreme Leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now that Ahmadinejad is president, they claim his finger is on the button. (Oh wait, Iran doesn't have a nuclear button yet and won't for at least three to eight years, according to the CIA, by which point Ahmadinejad may not be president anymore. But these are just facts.)
In a speech last week, Rudy Giuliani said that while the Soviet Union and China could be deterred during the cold war, Iran can't be. The Soviet and Chinese regimes had a "residual rationality," he explained. Hmm. Stalin and Mao—who casually ordered the deaths of millions of their own people, fomented insurgencies and revolutions, and starved whole regions that opposed them—were rational folk. But not Ahmadinejad, who has done what that compares? One of the bizarre twists of the current Iran hysteria is that conservatives have become surprisingly charitable about two of history's greatest mass murderers.
If I had to choose whom to describe as a madman, North Korea's Kim Jong Il or Ahmadinejad, I do not think there is really any contest. A decade ago Kim Jong Il allowed a famine to kill 2 million of his own people, forcing the others to survive by eating grass, while he imported gallons of expensive French wine. He has sold nuclear technology to other rogue states and threatened his neighbors with test-firings of rockets and missiles. Yet the United States will be participating in international relief efforts to Pyongyang worth billions of dollars.
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Member Comments
Posted By: Cleverman @ 05/01/2008 2:32:10 PM
Comment: There has been quite a bit of hurtful language among the comments here. So gstorm85, flipzeppelin, and frydulka, a very spirited Seig Heil to the three of you on this pleasant May day. You do not remember obviously 1979 when these lunatic Iranians took our US Embassy staff by force, breaking all international laws and held them captive under brutal conditions for 444 days. You do not remember 1982-83 when Iran's paid assassins Hezbollah blew up a barracks in Beirut Lebanon killing over 200 US Marines, and 50 French soldiers. You do not recognize that Hezbollah was the perpetrator of the blowing up of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aries Argentina in the early 1990s killing 83 people, and for which the government of Argentina has issued an interpol arrest warrant for the former Iranian leaders Rafsanjani and Fallahian last November connected to that act of terrorism. Iran today is forming its own private terrorist army in the 3 country area of South America from which it can launch operations against the US homeland through our porous border with Mexico. You are not thinking about the alliances being formed with Venezuela's own lunatic, Hugo Chavez, and with the Bolivians, and perhaps with Brazil's left leaning government. You do not mention Iran's holding of several Al Queda leaders in a resort town in Northern Iran, but they will not turn these people over to the US for questioning about 9/11 activities. Of course, since you despise Jews, you may have attended the conference in Tehran last year hosted by Amaddogonajihad which had a theme to prove that the Holocaust never happened. These are fine people running the government in Tehran. We just need to understand them better according to your way of thinking, It is the idiots in our own government you condemn. It is a lot like blaming the victim in a rape situation.
Posted By: logic&reason @ 05/01/2008 1:38:27 PM
Comment: Perhaps the muslim author has a bias?
Posted By: logic&reason @ 05/01/2008 1:38:19 PM
Comment: Perhaps the muslim author has a bias?