Irresponsible world leadership

Today, we had yet another example of the leader of a nation making stunningly ill-informed, patently offensive, jaw-droppingly bellicose statements. President Ahmed-in-a-Jihad of Iraqn made his third recorded statement that Israel should be destroyed or relocated out of the Middle East and that the Nazi Holocaust was nothing but a myth used as a pretext to rob the Palestinians of their rightful homeland. It played very well to his "base" domestically, and the broad-based international condemnation was more of a badge of honor than an impediment, with the stunned embarrassment of his domestic critics dismissed as irrelevant.

Does that sound at all familiar as a political modus operandi?

President Bush and his henchmen claimed that they were absolutely certain that Saddam Hussein had massive stockpiles of WMDs, active programs to develop nuclear weapons, and extensive operational coördination with al Qaeda, none of which proved true. He persevered in the face of worldwide condemnation, to the chagrin of his own countrymen. He played to his own war-mongering base, and portrayed the criticism either as unpatriotic or as nothing more than reïnforcement of his own decisiveness.

I have said before that the glib comparisons of George W. Bush to Hitler are absurd and obscene; they dishonor all who lost their lives, from the concentration camps to the armies of the world marching on the Third Reich. However, the comparisons between George W. Boosh and Mahmoud Ahmed-in-a-Jihad are entirely too close for comfort. The main difference is that Bush already has nuclear weapons.