Iran's 'Good News'

From IBD:
Posted 4/11/2006

Terror State: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his country has succeeded in enriching uranium and warned of "everlasting hatred" if the West intervened. Hitler couldn't have put it better.
'We want nothing else than to be left in peace," an elected leader once said. "We want the possibility of going on with our work. We claim for our people the right to live, the same right which others claim for themselves."

Sounds pretty reasonable, doesn't it? In fact, it sounds a lot like Ahmadinejad lately, who's been claiming Iran has as much right to nuclear energy as the U.S., Japan, India, Pakistan and the dozens of other countries with nuclear reactors.

But the words above were spoken by Adolf Hitler at Weimar, Germany, on Nov. 6, 1938, the month after Nazi troops occupied the Sudetenland and three days before Kristallnacht.

If we learn one thing from the history of appeasement, it should be that aggressors are usually also liars. So when Ahmadinejad says he has a message of "good nuclear news," and then announces that "Iran has joined the club of nuclear countries," and when he calls on Western democracies "not to cause an everlasting hatred in the hearts of Iranians" by forcing Iran to halt its nuclear program, it would be foolish to take his words at face value.

It must also be noted that Ahmadinejad spoke before an audience that included military commanders. And the setting of his nationally televised speech was Iran's second largest city, Mashad — meaning "place of martyrdom." To Shiites, it's the holiest site in Iran because the Iman Reza was poisoned there in the ninth century.

Clearly, one of Ahmadinejad's aims was to drum up popular support for his theocratic rule by linking Iran's nuclear program with national pride. And judging from the fists raised by some in the audience, he succeeded. As the protege of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, Ahmadinejad will always find a bogeyman like the U.S. handy in quelling Iranians' resentment against lack of freedom or economic hardship.

The timing of the announcement was impeccable. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel peace laureate who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, arrives this week to broker a deal between Iran and the West. ElBaradei has been dovish when it comes to Iranian nukes, and he seems to think that letting Iran run a small nuclear-enrichment program is a viable compromise.

Now he'll arrive in Tehran to find just that up and running.

ElBaradei won his Nobel Peace Prize for "efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes." He also wants the U.S. to scrap its nukes.

"A clear road map for nuclear disarmament should be established," he wrote in The New York Times two years ago. "We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security."

That's pacifist utopianism in the era of terrorism.

When it comes to the free world dealing with an evil that is paired with destructive power, things are no different now than they were in Europe in 1938: Compromise can be no option.