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.
We're on a path to irreversible confrontation with a country we know almost nothing about.
Zakaria's entire piece is worth reading. Presidential candidate Obama has mentioned Fareed's name as a possible Secretary of State candidate, which comforts those of us who still labor under the far-flung belief that Obama still has a chance to win. (He does, dammit!)
That reminds me, when exactly is Ann Coulter scheduled to partake in the Islamo-Fascist Awareness festivities at Tulane University? Those Green Wavers sure get their money's worth, don't they?
Also, it would be a helluva lot easier to make fun of anti-historical Conservative Hysterics if people on my side would maintain their perspective. After calling I-F Awareness Week "fascist", and spending a thousand words mulling over whether this stupid little conservative circle jerk should be Ignored or Confronted, Reggie Dylan at Indymedia comes to a measured conclusion about why I-F Awareness Week should be vigorously opposed:
The battle against "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" and the brownshirt offensive may be the crucible through which a new generation cuts its teeth and finds its place in history. All who want a better world should relish this fight.
Give me a break! You're going to measure yourself on this?!
Of course, the crucial difference between the cited hysteria here is that Indymedia, unlike Giuliani, is not the current presidential frontrunner of a major American party.
(The best course of action, btw, is to laugh and poke fun when people clown.)
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Update: Liprap has more on this. She says we should "ignore" Coulter.
