Infantile Nation

Does this generation possess the gravitas to
lead the world?

Considering the hysteria that greeted the request of
Iran`s

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to lay a wreath at Ground Zero,
the answer is no.

What is it about this tiny man that induces such
irrationality?

Answer: He is president of a nation that is a

"state sponsor of terror," that is
seeking nuclear weapons, and is moving munitions to the
Taliban and insurgents in Iraq.

But Libya was a "state sponsor of terror," and
Col. Khadafi was responsible for Pan Am 103, the
Lockerbie massacre of school kids coming home for
Christmas. And President Bush secretly negotiated a
renewal of relations in return for Khadafi giving up his
nuclear program and compensating the families of the
victims of that atrocity. Has Ahmadinejad ever committed
an act of terror like this?

Richard Nixon went to Moscow and concluded

strategic arms agreements while Moscow was the arms
supplier of the enemy we were fighting in Vietnam that

used, at

Hue, mass murder as a war tactic.

Nixon went to Beijing to toast Mao Zedong, the
greatest mass murderer in history, responsible for the
deaths of 37,000 Americans in Korea, who was, in 1972,
persecuting and murdering dissidents in the

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution run by his
crazed wife, and

transshipping Russian weapons into Vietnam.

And Nixon is today hailed as a statesman for

having gone there.

In 1959,

President Eisenhower rode up Pennsylvania Avenue in
an open convertible with Nikita Khrushchev,

Stalin`s gauleiter in Ukraine, who, three
years before his

tour of the United States, had sent tanks into
Budapest to butcher the patriots of the

Hungarian Revolution.

What has Ahmadinejad done to rival these monsters?

It would be an obscenity, we are told, if Ahmadinejad
were allowed to place a wreath at Ground Zero. This is a
public relations stunt that should never be permitted.

That the Iranian president has PR in mind is
undoubtedly true. Much of what national leaders do is
symbolic. But that wreath-laying would have said
something else, as well.

It would have said that, to Iran, these Americans
were victims who deserve to be honored and mourned and,
by extension, the men who killed them were murderers.
Bin Laden celebrates 9-11. So do all America-haters. By
laying a wreath at Ground Zero, the president of Iran
would be saying that in the war between al-Qaida and the
United States, he and his country side with the United
States.

How would we have been hurt by letting him send this
message?

To the hysteriacs, Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler and
we are all at Munich, and we should behave like
Churchill and gird for war.

This is absurd.

True, as The Washington Times

charges, Ahmadinejad invited David Duke to Tehran to
a conference of Holocaust deniers, and his minions
chant, "Death to America" and "Death to
Israel."

But every mob in the Middle East shouts such slogans.
And Duke was the Republican candidate for governor of
Louisiana in 1991 and got a majority of the white vote.
And Holocaust deniers meet regularly in the United
States. Yet, we seem to survive.

Far more serious was the threat of Khrushchev in 1956
to rain down rockets on Britain in the Suez crisis and
his

"We-will-bury-you"rant. Still, JFK met him in Vienna and
negotiated a test-ban halt.

Far more serious was Mao`s talk, after the Cuban
missile crisis, of accepting "300 million dead"
in a nuclear war—talk that scared even Khrushchev. Fidel
Castro reportedly urged the Russians to fire their
rockets rather than give them up. Those were deadly
serious times.

Hitler could destroy the Jewish population of Europe
because he was able to conquer Europe from the Atlantic
to the Urals. Iran has no air force or navy we could not
dispatch in a week and no nukes. Israel has 200 to 300
nuclear warheads and, if it believed its survival was at
stake, could turn Tehran into toast in 10 minutes.

Why does Iran want nuclear weapons if it doesn`t want
to use them? For the same reason Israel wanted them:
deterrence.

After seeing what America did to its non-nuclear
neighbor Iraq, which had done nothing to America, and
after hearing Bush call them an axis-of-evil nation and
prime candidate for U.S. pre-emptive strikes, a
not-unreasonable ayatollah might conclude they need
nuclear weapons, or the Americans will be dictating to
them forever.

America and Iran have great differences, but also
common interests. Among the latter, no Taliban in Kabul,
no restoration of a Sunni Baathist dictatorship in
Baghdad and support for the present governments. Iran
cannot want a Sunni-Shia war in the region, which would
make her an enemy of most Arabs, and she cannot want a
major war with America, which could lead to the
destruction and breakup of the nation where only half
the people are Persians.

That is plenty to build a cold peace on, if the
hysteriacs do not stampede us into another unnecessary
war.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs


no introduction to VDARE.COM
readers; his book

State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and
Conquest of America,

can be ordered from
Amazon.com.