Mark Steyn on Iran

Mark Steyn wields a mean hammer. He has kegs full of nails, and he manages to hit each one squarely on the head. His column Sunday in the Chicago Sun-Times is a perfect example.

On the surface, his column appears to be about Iran's new president and his call for the elimination of Israel (the Jewish nation--not the land itself) from the face of the earth, or as a Plan B, the elimination of Israel from the Middle East in favor of a new location around Germany and Austria.

But the Iranian president's apocalyptic comments serve only as context for Steyn's real targets: diplomats.

It's the perfect solution to the "Middle East peace process": out of sight, out of mind. And given that Ahmadinejad's out of his mind, we're already halfway there.

So let's see: We have a Holocaust denier who wants to relocate an entire nation to another continent, and he happens to be head of the world's newest nuclear state.

So how does the United States react? Well, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that the comments of Ahmadinejad "further underscore our concerns about the regime."

"Diplomatic" language is one of the last holdovers of the pre-democratic age. It belongs to a time when international relations were conducted exclusively between a handful of eminent representatives of European dynasties.

Diplomacy is for decent, civilized nations. It's for countries that actually want to come to an agreement that's based on what's good for the world. It doesn't work when one of the nations seeks the anihilation of another. It doesn't work when one nation uses it merely to buy time until it has the strength or weapons that allow it to boldly break diplomatic agreements, with deadly results.

We assume, as Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and other civilized men did 70 years ago, that these chaps may be a little excitable, but come on, old boy, they can't possibly mean it, can they? Wrong. They mean it but they can't quite do it yet. Like Hitler, when they can do it, they will -- or at the very least the weedy diplo-speak tells them they can force the world into big concessions on the fear that they can.

If a genocidal fantasist is acceptable in polite society, we'll soon find ourselves dealing with a genocidal realist.