DENIAL TO THE Nth POWER

While the Hitleresque President of Iran continues to go around making veiled threats about Israel "disappearing" or being "wiped off the map", it is interesting to note this article, that:

Iran's parliament wants the next presidential elections to be held more than one year early, the Fars news agency reported Sunday.

Parliament approved a draft bill upon which the parliamentary and presidential elections would be held simultaneously in the first quarter of 2008.

As the next parliamentary elections are scheduled for February 2008, but the next presidential elections for June 2009, the new bill would reduce the four-year presidential term of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by almost one and a half years.

Too bad they didn't propose this a few years ago. In fact, going even farther back in time, it is really too bad that during the 1979 Iran Hostage crisis we didn't deal with Ahmadinejad and his band of thugs more assertively. He might not have been in a position to run for President of Iran several decades later.

While it is tempting to think that Ahmadinejad might eventually disappear into the dustbin of history, the proposed date is, alas, too far off in the future to matter much today. Indeed, if the Carter Administration had not been in such hopeless denial and so terrified of its own shadow, history might have taken a different turn at that particular fork.

It was psychological denial then, and it is psychological denial now.

From the Dry Bones Blog, we have this astute observation:



Did you know that Quranic "scholars" have determined that it is OK to kill 4 million women, children and men (specifying that up to 2 million can be children)? That is is OK to leave up to 8 million homeless? And a few hundred thousand maimed and crippled?

Can you imagine normal human beings spending their time calculating things like this (let alone those who insist that Islam is a "religion of peace") ?

It is almost banal to talk about evil these days when there are countless vile incidents and innumerable insane psychopathic people who perpetrate them on a daily basis. We are used to speaking that way about lone serial killers, who up until recently were monstrous enough for our sensibilities.

But the religion of Islam in both its Sunni and Shia variants has spawned a meta-Evil -- an "uber" malignancy that has no corollary in history.

Certainly there have been historical events that intimated the depths of evil to which men may sink. The Holocaust in WWII instantly comes to mind. And until the early 21st Century, Hitler was the epitome of the worse evil that could have been imagined by humanity. Even today, more than five six decades afterwards, the worse insult you can foist on a world leader is to compare him or her to Herr Hitler.

Of course, it is important to remember that Hiter did not have today's sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. If he had, then the unbelievable amout of death coldly and calculatedly meted out by the Nazi's in their short existence would simply boggle the mind.

As if jealous of the infamously elevated status Hiter has obtained in world history, Ahmadinejad seems obsessed with minimizing Hiter's murderous accomplishments. One can only conclude that he intends to put even Hitler and the Nazi's to shame.

We are talking about a person whose daily paranoid rhetoric deals with the desired extermination of millions of people because they are Jews. This rhetoric is born out of a psychological envy of Israeli success and hatred of the values that made that success possible. It differs little from the envy and hatred directed toward America. Ahmadinejad and Bin Laden both justify their homicidal impulses with decorous, formal religious language and repeated invocations stating how great their bloodthirsty god is.

Compared to these religious fanatics, Hitler was a mere piker.

What is most frightening is that both maniacs combine a religious primitivism with a paradoxical technological sophistication. As they search for the perfect weapons to carry out their holy duty, will the civilized world continue to deny the threat?

Diplomacy and negotiation are meaningless in dealing with regimes like Iran and fanatics like Ahmadinejad and his puppet-masters, the mullahs. Seeking their "assistance" in stabilizing Iraq is worse than foolish; it is psychological denial taken to the n^th power. The "realists" who propose such a scenario might as well suggest that America discuss with Osama and Al Qaeda the possibility of his helping to "stabilize" the fledgling democracy in Afghanistan.

If we had faced the reality of the threat of Islamic fundamentalism twenty years ago, then perhaps today we might have more than one or two military options open to us to get serious with Iran and make Ahmadinejad, the mullahs (and perhaps even Osama) finally disappear.

As bad as any military option might be, remaining in denial to the n^th degree will assuredly have even more catastrophic consequences.