Tony Blankley has an excellent piece in the Washington Times on the mental path to appeasement regarding Iran's drive for nuclear weapons. Since I am currently re-reading William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I especially liked this bit from Blankley's column...

Virtually no one believes Iran only wants peaceful nuclear generation. Neither do serious people believe that enactable economic and diplomatic sanctions will deflect the Iranians from their objective. Thus, the offer on the table — to give them peaceful nuclear technology or threaten them with non-military sanction — suffers from providing a "carrot that is not tempting and a stick that is not threatening" (the quote is from Ian Kershaw's "Making Friends with Hitler"). This evolving mental path to appeasement mirrors in uncanny detail a similar path taken by the British government to Hitler in the 1930s. Contrary to popular history, the British government was under little illusion concerning Hitler's nature and objectives in the early 1930s. Those illusions only emerged as mental rationalizations later in the 1930's. In April 1933, just three months after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, the British government presciently assessed the man and his plans. The outgoing British ambassador to Germany, Sir Horace Rumbold, who had been closely observing Hitler for years, reported back to London in a special dispatch to the prime minister on April 26, 1933. He warned his government to take "Mein Kampf" seriously. He assessed that Hitler would resort to periodic peaceful claims "to induce a sense of security abroad." But that he planned to expand into Russia and "would not abandon the cardinal points of his program," but would seek to "lull adversaries into such a state of coma that they will allow themselves to be engaged one by one." The ambassador was sure that "a deliberate policy is now being pursued, whose aim was to prepare Germany militarily before her adversaries could interfere." He also warned that Hitler personally believed in his violent anti-Semitism and that it was central to his government policy. Back in London, Major General A.C. Temperley briefed the prime minister on the Rumbold dispatch that if Britain did not stop Hitler right away, the alternative was "to allow things to drift for another five years, by which time ... war seems inevitable." In the event, general war in Europe came in six years, not five. But because the British people, still under the sway of their memory of WWI, were against military action, and because the politicians wanted to spend precious tax revenues on domestic programs, they walked away from their own good judgment.

Read the whole thing. I would also point out that the military dictator of Poland and the President of France discussed launching a preventive war against Germany upon Hitler's coming to power in 1933. If they had done so, they would have easily won and Hitler and his whole crowd would have been imprisoned or killed. Such a war would have resulted in a few thousand deaths, but it would have prevented the larger war that later killed tens of millions of people.

Jeff Jacoby says there are signs of progress in Iraq. Ralph Peters says the MSM cannot be too happy with all the good news coming out of Iraq. Meanwhile, Senator John Kerry says we should set a deadline for withdrawal. Kerry is certainly singing to the choir that booed Senator Hillary Clinton when she suggested such a deadline would be unwise.

Fortunately, we have a President who will not surrender to the terrorists, whether they are plotting to behead the Canadian Prime Minister or setting IEDs in Iraq. He correctly sees Iraq as part of the overall war, and will not bow down to a public that is no longer buying what he is selling. I only wish he would take the gloves off our soldiers and put the muzzle on the press, like President Roosevelt did in WWII.