Negotiating with madmen - the ghost of Jimmy Carter stalks the Middle East

FT.com / World / Middle East & Africa - Iran may charge British sailors :
"The Iranian military said at the weekend the 15 personnel held near the Shatt al-Arab waterway dividing Iraq from Iran had committed “blatant aggression” and were being interrogated. The rhetoric in Tehran escalated, with some regime loyalists seeing a chance to use the case to help free five Iranian officials taken by US forces in northern Iraq in January."

The mad mullahs are still at it. When Jimmy Carter decided to tolerate the Iranian invasion of the US Embassy in Teheran three decades ago, he made it clear that the US would not insist on being treated with the minimum of respect that one nation demands from another. That was an act of war and we flinched. No wonder we are having trouble being taken seriously now.

Of course the brunt of the latest outrage is being borne by an unfortunate band of British sailors and marines. But it's the same old game.

To all those fools and well-meaning knot-heads who are clamoring for more diplomacy with Iran, what planet are they on?

Earlier today I read an email sending around what was supposed to be a letter from a congressman to a constituent explaining his support of a resolution asking for more diplomacy with Iran and Syria. Since I can't vouch for the veracity of its authorship, I won't name the congressman, but the sentiment is fairly conventional. One of the arguments adduced for this course is the electoral prospects of reformers in Iran.

How can reformers ever gain any real power in Iran when the religious authorities maintain an absolute veto power over all candidates, public officials and laws? These mullahs are not the sort of shrinking violets we are accustomed to democratic societies who will sell out their principles and their country rather than endure some bad publicity. These men are absolutely convinced that, if they hang tough, they or their successors will rule the world. On the record of how they have been doing for the last three decades, they have every reason for such confidence.

The mullahs of Iran depend heavily at the present time on allies among the unrepentant communists of the PRC and the DPRK, as well as the crypto-communists of the former Soviet Union. But this is, to them, a passing phase. They have no respect for their allies of convenience and fully expect those infidels to cave in to them along the way to their eventual triumph.

I am not advocating an invasion of Iran, nor even necessarily air strikes and commando raids. The time for all that was when the US embassy was seized. Anyone who thought that by putting US troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq that we would be putting Iran in a vise just didn't think things through. All we have done is to pin down our own forces in a way that prevents them from being of any use against Iran.

What I am saying is that we are in a war, but not the war on terror that our leaders insist we are fighting. We are in a fight for the life of Western Christian Civilization. Our old enemies from the Cold War, the communists, are still around in most of their former domains and a few new ones; but now they are in alliance with a particularly militant brand of Islam which threatens to topple the current regimes of the Muslim countries it does not already control. The big change from the Cold War is that we have lost many of our allies. Britain and Australia are still with us, but much of Europe may well be lost to us already and what remains has little of material support to offer.