Diplomacy bad!

Aaaahh, only in the world of Mad Mel could the news that America is sending diplomats to Iran, along with a senior official to talk about various nuclear related topics, be taken as a sign of impending doom.

Unless this is all an elaborate bluff, the suspicion must be that what the Bush administration is now focused upon is not safeguarding the survival of Israel and the freedom of the world but on winning the presidency for the Republicans.

Wait, Bush was focused upon safeguarding the freedom of the world? Since when?

Meanwhile Israel is being isolated by America, which is giving Iran a further gift of the thing it most craves –

Chocolate? Also, and maybe this is just the coffee talking, but if Israeli planes are being stationed at US bases in Iraq for an attack, and the deployment of another aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf signal some sort of abandonment and isolation, then I'm not sure how much more support Mad Mel would consider to be acceptable. One of Jordan's presumably titanium reinforced bras?

time to build its nuclear weapons capability.

Oh. Not chocolate then. Also, would this be the nuclear weapons program that was stopped in 2003?

What should be happening now is that the Iranian regime should be under the maximum economic diplomatic and military pressure, treated as a pariah state and kept guessing about the possibility of a US attack, all in order to weaken and destabilise it.

Because that sounds so unlike what is currently being done.

History teaches us, after all, that war is the inevitable outcome of appeasement because, instead of preventing bad people from doing bad things, it galvanises them further to do so. When the Americans talked to the Japanese, the result was Pearl Harbour. When Chamberlain talked to Hitler, the result was the invasion of Poland. And when Britain tried to appease the Arab Nazis in 1930s Palestine by offering to reward them for their terrorist intransigence by giving them half the land promised to the Jews, the result was the Arab war of annihilation against the reborn Jewish state -- a war which continues to this day.

Reminder: The history of diplomacy spans 1930-1945. Kissinger, Metternich, Machiavelli et al can fuck right off.

Moreover, Iran is as strong as it is today only because of the astounding fact that America has refused to fight back in the war that Iran has been prosecuting against it now for almost three decades.

Oh psh. Iran was just another bitchy attention whore looking to bait America, Mel. I mean, geeze, haven't you heard the phrase "Don't feed the trolls"? Look what happened last time we ignored that advice, with Bin Laden. He just won't shut the fuck up anymore. Do you really want us to have to suffer 20,000 video messages from that smirking bastard, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Shit, he annoys me enough as it is.

It is however quite staggering to witness this change in attitude towards Israel by a man who had been arguably the most pro-Israel American president in history. Yet now he is giving the impression that – in the prescient cry of Ariel Sharon – Israel is to play the role of Czechoslovakia in 1938, with William Burns about to join the EU in sealing its fate in a re-run of the Munich agreement.

I totally got that from his speech on the 60th Anniversary of Israel's founding:

Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Clearly a deceitful, shify, tree-hugging Chamberlain fan-boi if ever I saw one. You give him hell Melanie! Incidentally, and as an aside, I am loving this current trend of hard-right commentators and politicians tearing each other apart. May it long continue.

It is that systematic accommodation with genocidal terror and the sacrifice of truth and justice on the altar of appeasement which is the single most important reason for the never-ending Middle East impasse -- and why the whole of the free world is now about to be held to ransom.

Let it never be said that Mad Mel is not capable of reasoned, sober and not at all hysterical pronouncements on world events.

But thank God that article is finally over. My penace to the international blogging community is paid for another week.