The Mussolini of the Middle East Stabs America in the Back

Joel J. Sprayregen
American Thinker
24 June '10
Posted before Shabbat


The Middle East has its Hitler wannabe in Iranian President Ahmadinejad. His nuclear weaponization program has accelerated over eighteen months while Obama's "engagement" is being rebuffed with contemptuous defiance from Tehran. Like Hitler in Mein Kampf, Ahmadinejad has made clear his belief that the Jews of Israel should be annihilated.

Every Hitler needs his Mussolini. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan -- a man I know well -- is enthusiastically volunteering for that role.

The Hitler analogy should be viewed in terms of the late 1930s rather than the wartime 1940s. By the time Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, he had contemptuously resisted limitations on German rearmament and achieved his territorial aims in the infamous delivery of Czechoslovakia at Munich. He accomplished this while England slept -- in John Kennedy's famous phrase -- without firing a shot.

What does this have to do with Ahmadinejad? The Iranians know that once they possess nuclear weapons, they will have achieved hegemony over the Middle East, with all its energy resources, without firing a shot. As the evidence accumulates that Obama lacks the will to take action to stop the Iranian quest, the countries of the Middle East are compelled to come to terms with the reality that the United States will not use its power to defend its own interests and will settle for trying to "contain" a nuclear Iran. In the pitiless sunlight of the Middle East, reality is harshly defined. A nuclear-armed Iran means that the United States is a big loser. And that Iran is a decisive winner.

No Middle Eastern leader grasps this reality with more eager opportunism than the Turkish prime minister. A serious question is emerging as to whether our government understands this dynamic and its grave consequences. My conversations with State Department officials reveal at best only dim understanding. President Obama, delivering his first address to a foreign parliament in Ankara in April 2006, praised Turkey as a "true partner." In the first giddy flush of Obamamania, this may have been understandable hyperbole even though Erdogan had stabbed the U.S. in the back as long ago as 2003 by denying our forces entry into northern Iraq. But self-delusion in the White House as to critical U.S. interests is no longer rational, as increasing numbers of foreign policy experts -- many of them Obama supporters -- recognize that Turkey has decisively exited its alliance with the West.

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