ENGAGE IRAN?

If you read only one thing on the web today, read the letter from President Ahmadinejad to President Bush. Parts of it read as if it were written by Dennis Kucinich and other parts as if it were written by some souped-up Muslim version of Pat Robertson. Not surprisingly, some leftists are already saying the Bush should answer the letter by engaging with Iran.

This Iran-U.S. controversy needs to be seen in context. First and foremost, a nuclear-armed Iran under the present regime, which has said many times under many different circumstances by many different officials that it would like to see Israel disappear, is a threat to the interests of the United States. If the Mullahs are willing to think the unthinkable, as Austin Bay points out, that requires the Israelis to contemplate their own massive nuclear response, even without any U.S. assistance or action. Is this an acceptable outcome for the U.S. and its European allies? One can make the argument that a system of deterrence would form, just as it did between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and as it exists now between Pakistan and India. The difference is the virulence of anti-Semitism. We have seen how the ideology of Jew-hatred can lead to the most horrendous of acts, even to the detriment of a nation's survival. After all, the Nazis continued to divert badly needed resources to the extermination of the Jews even when those resources could have been used to help keep the Russian and Allied invaders at bay. Do not underestimate the power of that evil impulse to blame the Jews for all that is bad in the world to lead to even self-destructive acts.

In short, as long as Iran (and many others in the Middle East) hold onto the notion of a "final solution" to the Israeli problem, adding nuclear weapons to their side of the equation will not provide balance, as in the other scenarios discussed above but, rather, do just the opposite by creating a potentially catastrophic imbalance.