Axis Of Evil: Those who counsel us not to provoke Iran forget the lessons of history. Churchill didn't cause World War II; the appeasers of Nazi Germany did. And peace is an event, not a "process." 

It's sad when a major newspaper suggests we should fear Vice President Dick Cheney more than Iran's loony leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But that's what the Los Angeles Times did in a weekend editorial.

It opined that Cheney's "desire to bomb Iranian nuclear sites and Revolutionary Guard targets" was "backfiring, causing it to escalate its anti-American activities instead of backing off." Besides, we are told, the earliest Iran could threaten us with nuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles is 2015.
 
Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor after it was bombed by Israel in 1981.
So we should just press our snooze button?

Stop the presses: Iran already is killing Americans with advanced explosives smuggled to foreign jihadists in Iraq. It is the creator, banker and armory for Hezbollah, which killed 241 Americans in their Beirut barracks in 1983.
It is Hezbollah that provoked a war with Israel, used Lebanon as a human shield and is working as we speak to destabilize and destroy that multicultural democracy and replace it with an Islamofascist theocracy modeled on Ahmadinejad's Iran.
This is all Cheney's fault?

Ahmadinejad's threat to wipe Israel off the map is not just a misunderstanding between well-intentioned diplomats. It's a threat â?" no, a promise â?" as real and ominous as the blueprint for hell on Earth that Hitler drew up in his warning that no one took seriously, "Mein Kampf."

The fact is that soon, earlier than 2015, an Iranian freighter in international waters off, say, California, could launch a nuclear-armed Scud over the American heartland. The warhead would detonate high in the night sky, unleashing an electromagnetic pulse frying the Times' presses and sending the U.S. economy back 100 years. The war on terror would be over, and we would have lost.

The world should be thankful that Israel ignored the diplomats who would condemn it and went ahead in 1981 and bombed into rubble Iraq's French-designed Osirak reactor before it went operational. Had it waited for the U.N. or the IAEA to do something, as we're doing with Iran, Saddam might very well have had a nuke when he invaded Kuwait a decade later. There would have been no Desert Storm, no Operation Iraqi Freedom and the world, if not at war, would have been a very different and dangerous place.

Suggestions that President Bush "should stick to diplomacy" ignore that the history of the Middle East is replete with diplomatic failures. Just exactly where has the "peace process" and Yasser Arafat's shaking of Jimmy Carter's hand gotten us? No Nobel Peace Prize, with the possible exception of Al Gore's, has ever been given to a less deserving individual. The "road map to peace?" Are we there yet?

Speaking of Carter, we wouldn't be having this conversation about bussing Ahmadinejad's backside if America's worst president hadn't personally undercut our ally, the Shah of Iran, and ushered in the Ayatollah Khomeini. For 444 days, our embassy hostages couldn't read the L.A. Times. Carter ushered in tyranny in the name of human rights.
It wasn't diplomacy, but the force of arms that evicted Saddam and his legions from Kuwait. Had we seized the moment and marched to Baghdad, instead of letting diplomats negotiate a truce, the resumption of hostilities after Saddam violated 17 U.N. resolutions with impunity would have been unnecessary.

The only thing the U.N. accomplished in Iraq was the oil-for-fools, er, food program, which let Saddam evade U.N. sanctions, bribe U.N. and world officials, and earn money with which to build lavish palaces while the Iraqi people starved.
In "The Gathering Storm," his book on the lead-up to World War II, Winston Churchill recounted that when President Roosevelt asked him what the global conflict should be called, Churchill suggested "The Unnecessary War."
"There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle," Churchill told FDR.

Churchill knew that if the West confronted Hitler when he marched his horse-drawn infantry into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936, the Third Reich would have died in its infancy. But the Neville Chamberlains of the world advised that Hitler posed no imminent threat.

Later, Hitler would privately admit: "The 48 hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs, for the military resources at our disposal would have been wholly inadequate for even a moderate resistance."
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated by power, not parchment. The last world war started when a naive diplomat got off a plane from Munich, Germany, waving a piece of paper proclaiming "peace in our time." It ended when another piece of paper was signed on the deck of an American battleship in Tokyo Bay.

We face a similar choice today. We can stand and resist, or we can cower and appease. As John Stuart Mill once observed: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is worse."

From the Iraq Study Group and Sen. Barrack Obama to the L.A. Times and even columnist William Cohen (on the next page), the suggestion is that we can and must talk to Iran. Their naivete is exceeded perhaps only by the late Sen. William Borah who, on hearing of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, lamented: "Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."

If only we had talked more with Saddam Hussein. If only we had let sanctions work. If only we talk to Hezbollah, to Iran, to Syria. Someday let's not be saying: If only we had listened to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.