Is Iran really the new Nazi Germany?

If W and War Party are to be believed, yes. On the other hand, there are these pics by one of those peaceniks over at Lew Rockwell:





regarding the picture above:

For example, we can tell from the abundance of Christmas cards and trees and wrappings and ornaments and Santa Claus suits that Iran has a capitalist, consumer-oriented economy, with a large enough Christian community to support a whole host of retailers, wholesalers, distributors, suppliers, importers, and tree farms. And if we glance back at that incredible first shot of Tehran at the foot of the snow-covered Alborz Mountains, we can even say with certitude that the area around Tehran has just the right terrain, soil, and climate for the new-cut Christmas trees you see.

The rest of the column talks about Iran being rather cosmopolitan, with a big middle class and maybe not as oppressive a society as the government or the MSM would have you believe. What's the truth?

What do you mean my money's no good?

Iran drops the dollar:

Iran has completely stopped selling any of its oil for U.S. dollars, an Iranian news agency reported on Saturday, citing the oil minister of the world's fourth-largest crude producer.

The ISNA news agency did not give a direct quote from Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari. A senior oil official last month said "nearly all" of Iran's crude oil sales were now being paid for in non-U.S. currencies.

For nearly two years, OPEC's second biggest producer has been reducing its exposure to the dollar, saying the weak U.S. currency is eroding its purchasing power.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West, has called the U.S. currency a "worthless piece of paper."

Is there any greater indication on how far the dollar has fallen that even our "enemies" don't want it? The dollar has lost nearly 40 percent of its value in the past 7 years and the smoke and mirrors that the government has been using (not publishing m3, central bank bailouts, etc.) to mask that fact are not going to work. Our fundamentals are unsound.

The questions remain who are the people going to blame? What direction are we going to go to solve the problem?

Zakaria says that we have lost all perspective on Iran

From Newsweek:

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

In fact, Zakaria writes, the evidence is to the contrary:

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Why does President Bush feel that Iran is such a threat to our national security, going as far last week as to say that World War Three would be inevitable if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons? Here is something that Zakaria fails to mention about Iran. The war rhetoric from Bush on Iran has been nonstop since his "Axis of Evil' speech in 2002. Our transformation of Ahmadinejad into Hitler started when he was elected to office in 2005. One gets the feeling that Mother Theresa could be elected into the Iranian presidency, and, come hell or high water, they would be the new monster that the administration would have to slay in the name of stopping terrorism.

The New Hitler

Pat Buchanan weighs in on Ahmadinejad and his visit to the US this week:

It would be an obscenity, we are told, if Ahmadinejad were allowed to place a wreath at Ground Zero. This is a public relations stunt that should never be permitted.

That the Iranian president has PR in mind is undoubtedly true. Much of what national leaders do is symbolic. But that wreath-laying would have said something else, as well.

It would have said that, to Iran, these Americans were victims who deserve to be honored and mourned and, by extension, the men who killed them were murderers. Bin Laden celebrates 9-11. So do all America-haters. By laying a wreath at Ground Zero, the president of Iran would be saying that in the war between al-Qaida and the United States, he and his country side with the United States.

Which I can't say I disagree with. The rhetoric we've heard from Bush since his "Axis of Evil" speech has been one of provocation. But does Iran represent a direct threat to us? Maybe to our military that is in Iraq he is, but follow Pat's reasoning on what would compel Iran to seek nuclear weapons:

After seeing what America did to its non-nuclear neighbor Iraq, which had done nothing to America, and after hearing Bush call them an axis-of-evil nation and prime candidate for U.S. pre-emptive strikes, a not-unreasonable ayatollah might conclude they need nuclear weapons, or the Americans will be dictating to them forever.

Read the rest here.