Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Triumph

Imagine yourself as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now in your fourth year as president of Iran and about to make yet another appearance at the U.N.'s General Assembly in New York... [snip]

... since you took over you have installed thousands of centrifuges, spinning uranium roughly at a rate of a bomb's worth of fissile material every year. You've also caused Russia and China to split with the rest of the Security Council over stiffer penalties. Better yet, the Bush administration has gone from refusing to negotiate, to offering conditional negotiations, to pursuing low-level negotiations and now, lately, feeling its way toward tacit diplomatic normalization.

All that without you bending an inch toward the West.

Above all, you have given the world time to digest the notion that Iran will inevitably become a nuclear power, and that nothing can be done to stop it.

Will Americans agree to open a third military front in the Middle East? Does Israel want to roll the dice on a bombing run that will spark another bloody regional war but retard Iran's nuclear programs by at most a few years? How will the U.S. afford its epic Wall Street bailouts if you shut down the Straits of Hormuz?

Surely your enemies will take no such risks. Which is why you're pleased that the more far-seeing Americans are coming around to your point of view. Look at former CIA spy Robert Baer. Mr. Baer has a new book arguing that the U.S. ought not "to stand in the way of Iran's quest to dominate Islam." He thinks Israel's nuclear arms should be put under U.N. supervision. He believes the U.S. and Iran are ripe for the kind of alliance Nixon forged with Mao.

It cannot surprise you that such ideas are now taking root with the American intelligentsia; useful idiots always contribute to the revolution...

[this is the cost of communicating weakness: he's been convinced by Western Idiots that we'll do nothing, pushing us toward the least desirable option - again]

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