Kofi Sniffs The Post-Munich Atmosphere

History records that after the British and French forced Czechoslovakia to cough up the Sudetenland to Adolph Hitler at the Munich Conference in September, 1938, the Nazi dictator completely dismissed Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier, the respective British and French leaders, from his consideration of when and where and how to expand his Third Reich next. By that penultimate act of weakness and betrayal, they confirmed in Hitler’s eyes that they were utterly and absolutely no threat to his dreams of continental, and eventual global, conquest, and those ambitions grew accordingly, guaranteeing the Second World War that erupted just under a year later.

That is what makes this story so ominous to anybody who is paying attention to the continuing, and still functionally unopposed, and eerily similar rise of Islamist Iran:

The U.N. chief got little satisfaction Sunday at the close of his trip to Tehran, snubbed by Iran's leader over international demands to stop enriching uranium and ignored in warnings not to incite hatred by questioning the Holocaust.

In a provocative move on the final day of Kofi Annan's two-day visit, Iran announced it would host a conference to examine what it called exaggerations about the Holocaust, during which more than 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. ...

"On the nuclear issue, the president reaffirmed to me Iran's preparedness and determination to negotiate" a solution to the nuclear confrontation, Annan said at the news conference.

However, Ahmadinejad "reiterated that he did not accept suspension before negotiations," the U.N. chief said, conveying Iran's rejection of a condition set by the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany.

Clearly, the UN Secretary-General isn’t taken very seriously by the mullahgarchy if they feel no need to even be politic about their "snubbing" of his weak, plaintive requests. But something else in Cap’n Ed’s analysis prompted me to do a chiropractor-soliciting double-take:

It's one thing to defy the US and the UK, and even the UN Security Council. Making a fool out of a reliably pacifist world leader of Annan's significance is quite another. Either Iran no longer sees the need to appear cooperative, or they see Annan's usefulness as a shill at an end. Given Annan's still-considerable influence among the Third World, I'd have to conclude that Ahmadinejad has something up his sleeve that allows him enough confidence to be openly defiant of all. [emphases added]

There are two possibilities: either the mullahs are now convinced, especially after the Battle of Lebanon, that nobody – not the UK, the US, or the "international community" - will lift a finger to stop their ambitions for regional, and eventual global, conquest, which means that near-term war with Iran is guaranteed; or they already have nuclear weapons, and/or their indigenous nuke manufacturing program is further along than anybody in the outside world knows, meaning that that near-term war with Iran will be the first nuclear war of the post-WWII era.

Remember the timetable of War Plan R. Lebanon was just the appetizer for the incendiary main course that may even now be approaching the world’s table.

UPDATE: Here's more of the same dismal litany, first from Victor Davis Hanson:

Given Iraq, Afghanistan, and the acrimony at home — so similar to the debate right before Pearl Harbor over the earlier discounted fascist threat to the United States — we apparently are waiting for the enemy to strike again, before renewing the offensive.

So while we keep our defenses up at home, foster democracy in the heart of the Middle East in Afghanistan and Iraq, and hope the globalized march of modernity undermines jihadism faster than it can disrupt the 21st century, we also wait — for the next blow that we know will come.

From the big picture to the harrowingly more specific:

At midnight tonight, the U.N. Security Council’s deadline for Iran to stop enriching uranium will pass, but the centrifuges at Natanz will keep spinning. That Iran has defied the deadline should surprise no one. What does surprise us is that the President who swore he would not “permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons” does not show more urgency in fulfilling that pledge.

According to a senior Administration official, the U.S. will hold off on seeking sanctions through the U.N. for at least a month while trying to hammer out the details of a Security Council resolution with Europe. The charitable (and highly implausible) interpretation is that Condoleezza Rice and her top aide, R. Nicholas Burns, have good reason to believe that Europe is finally ready to break with its four-year history of appeasement and back some meaningful penalties. But as a display of resolve, the delay is rather less than impressive. If the West were really united against the mullahs — and if the U.S. and its allies really agreed on how to thwart them — the Iranian regime would see a draft resolution Friday morning. Instead, it will see a Security Council so irresolute that its members take weeks, even months, to agree with each other, and a United States that gives no clear signal of its willingness to move beyond fruitless and feckless diplomacy. [emphases mordantly added]

A nuclear Pearl Harbor? Why not? We've obviously forgotten the supposedly "unforgettable" lesson of 9/11. And the mullahs, like their Nazi forebears, have dismissed us from their considerations of when, where, and how to next expand the global Caliphate - evidently with good reason.

Summer may be winding down, but the heat wave is just beginning.