Talking to Iran a mistake for strategic, moral reasons - Victor Davis Hanson

One of the many bizarre recommendations in the recently released report from the bipartisan Iraq Study Group is the call to talk with Iran. A formal dialogue with the present Iranian leadership is, for a number of reasons, as misguided as it is amoral.

Our guides in these scary times of facing aggressive dictatorships still should be Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, not the British prime minister Stanley Baldwin and Joe Kennedy, the U.S. ambassador to Britain, who leading up to 1939 thought good could come out of talking with the Nazis.

First, the Iranian leadership goes beyond the usual boilerplate anti-Israel, anti-Semitic claptrap of the region. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has serially denied the Holocaust while promising the absolute destruction of Israel. Various mullahs have characterized Israel as a “one-bomb state,” implying a single Iranian nuclear bomb could destroy it. The vicious hatred is so institutionalized in Iran’s state-run media that a science-fiction TV series there depicts the evil alien queen as Jewish.

Why should we give stature to and empower a theocracy that apes the hatred of the Third Reich?