Wednesday, January 24, 2007

An Intolerable Threat

A nuclear North Korea helps Iran with nuclear testing, in defiance of the world community which seeks to limit nuclear proliferation. Iran ratchets up the rhetoric:
Israel and the United States will soon be destroyed, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday during a meeting with Syria's foreign minister, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) website said in a report.

"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad… assured that the United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will soon come to the end of their lives," the Iranian president was quoted as saying.

And from an observer writing about Iran's denial of the Holocaust in the International Herald Tribune, hardly a rightist rag (owned by the NY Times---do you think they read it?):

In Germany, the Holocaust denial issue goes to the deepest vein of self- respect in the national psyche. In announcing that the Merkel government would propose a law in the European Parliament creating penalties for negationism, Brigitte Zypries, the justice minister, said flatly: "There are limits to freedom of expression. It must not be possible in Europe to consider the Holocaust a myth and say that six million Jews were never killed."

But in this moment's onstage political discourse, it just isn't part of the acceptable vocabulary to say that in lying about the existence of the Holocaust, in calling for the destruction of another UN member state and in running from the apparent truth of your own nuclear weapons ambitions, Ahmadinejad's Iran has joined these three facts together into an inescapable, menacing reality.

Merkel avoids this explicit triple- connection; Chirac, thinking of Iran's role in Lebanon, seems conflicted by it, while Tony Blair comes the closest to saying unmistakably that Iran is an intolerable threat.

Meanwhile Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, is selling missile defense systems to Iran. Iran, the terror state. Want to take a bet on any sanctions with teeth coming out of that body?

Axis of Evil with nukes---an intolerable threat. If we fail in Iraq, who will deal with Iran?

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