On November 4, 1979, some Iranian “students” took 53 American diplomats hostage. This iconic act broke every international law ever set to page or parchment.

As this is written thirty years later, the Iranians are holding three American tourists who wandered across a border between Iraq and allegedly into Iran’s Kurdistan province. They were seized in August.

Taking hostages is what the Iranian government does. Even Iranian-born, naturalized Americans, visiting their family members are subject to arrest and detainment.

We do things differently in America. If you sneak in across our border, you qualify for a driver’s license, food stamps, and free medical care. Can’t speak English? That’s okay, we will print everything in Spanish for you. If two border guards should, in the course of their duty, shoot you in the butt, it is they who get sent to prison.

It took 444 days to get our diplomats returned.

The United States has, rather understandably, not reestablished diplomatic relations with the ayatollahs and mullahs in Tehran and they have been very happy to keep telling their people that the U.S. is the “Great Satan” and to encourage them to shout “Death to America” at every opportunity. It’s become a state-sponsored ritual there as in “I now pronounce you man and wife, and death to America.”

Let me exempt the Iranian “people” from the Iranian thugs running the nation under the guidance of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or his vile toady, Mamoud Ahmadinejad. You can always tell the difference because the people are the ones in the streets protesting, being shot dead, arrested, imprisoned, and never heard from again.

I tell you this because, if you haven’t heard, the mad mullahs have been pursuing their dream of homemade nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them ever since those “students” long ago scampered onto the grounds of our embassy.

They are very close to having both and they think the Americans, the Europeans, and the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are idiots and all of them have provided amply evidence that they are. The IAEA has never ever found any weapons making facilities that they didn’t think could be converted to peaceful purposes or just ignored entirely.

There is a reason why the Israelis are getting ready to bomb the hell out of the Iranian nuclear facilities. The obvious one is that the mad mullahs have never made any attempt to disguise the fact that they intend to destroy Israel.

Quite coincidentally, on November 3th, the Israeli navy commandeered the Antigua-flagged arms ship which carried 300 containers, 40 of which contained hundreds of Iranian arms bound for use by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Most of it was ammo, grenades, 122-km Katyusha rockets, mortar shells and anti-tank missiles. Experts estimated it would have kept Hezbollah fighting for a month or more. The arms originated in Iran.

The other reason the Israelis will do our job is because the United States, rarely a reliable ally under the best of circumstances, know that we have a President who doesn’t like them or should we just say, prefers his fellow Muslims to them.

Obama has never understood the utter duplicity of the Iranians and overestimated his ability to deal with them. They, conversely, have concluded he was weak and could be easily misled and deterred.

Dore Gold, a former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, has written “The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West.” He points out that, “Given that the Islamic Republic was the first to systematically employ suicide bombing attacks in the present era, it could very well be immune to deterrence and the threat of full scale retaliation should it employ nuclear weapons.”

It is the ultimate game of “chicken” and the U.S. is already showing a big yellow streak as President Obama contemplates whether to put more troops into Afghanistan or leave enough to achieve nothing in particular except to get more of our troops killed.

In basic terms, the mullahs do not fear us because we have given them no reason to, whereas the Israelis have a track record, having destroyed a nuclear facility in Iraq in the 1980s and more recently in Syria.

On the anniversary of the taking of American hostages, America looked scared. The best the President could muster was a photo opportunity saluting the returning dead.

The Israelis will attack Iran because they must and President Obama will denounce them when they do because he can.

In the movie, “Groundhog Day”, the main character wakes up day after day, trapped in the same events, desperately looking for a way out of that living nightmare. It’s a very good metaphor for the Middle East.

Here are some quotes from a book whose title I will reveal in a moment:

“The only truly transcendent law in the Middle East is that of unintended consequences.”

“Nation-building and the redressing of historic wrongs were in the air…”

“His fighters secured control of key rivers, recaptured Kut, and on (date withheld) stormed victoriously into Baghdad. Still undecided was how this famous city—and, indeed, most of Mesopotamia—would now be governed.”

“I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can’t as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn’t govern and we have tried to govern…and failed.”

And finally “Our armies have come into your cities and lands not as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”

All this and more was said in the 1920s by British imperialists. If it sounds like things being said by Americans, then you must assume that America has been repeating all the mistakes of Great Britain in the exact same places.

The book being quoted is “Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East” by Karl E. Mayer and Shareen Blair Brysac ($18.95, W.W. Norton, softcover) and its five-hundred pages are devoted to the extraordinary personalities of the 1920s who, believing it was Great Britain’s duty was to bring civilization to India, Africa, and the Middle East, devoted themselves to “Pax Britannia”, the rule of distant colonies representing a fourth of the world’s population.

The book is a reminder that whatever passes for modernity in the Middle East has generally been imposed by the process of European colonization in quest of its oil and other riches to fatten the profits of various British, French, and American business enterprises such as the Suez Canal and the oil companies.

Left to themselves the polyglot of tribes would never have experienced anything resembling modernization.

Afghanistan today would look very much the same to the earliest invaders and explorers who passed through it. No roads. No hospitals. Few schools. No jobs except raising poppies for the heroin trade or serving in the army or police. Men raised from youth to fight anyone and everyone. Pushtuns, Tajiks, Hazarus, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and Qizilbash.

The Middle East had been ruled by the Turkish Ottoman Empire for centuries—from Egypt to Persia. Going back even further in history, the region was no stranger to European invasions. The Crusades were a response against the Islamic invaders that at one point had laid siege to Vienna.

As the authors note, “In his history of Jerusalem, the Israeli writer Amos Elon calculates that over four millennia the Holy City has known ‘twenty ruinous sieges, two intervals of total destruction, eighteen recent reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religion to another.” In 1967 visitors could find the remnants of “Roman encampments, Crusader castles, Turkish parapets, and British pillboxes.”

To suggest, for example, that after more than sixty years of Israeli national sovereignty that Arab neighbor nations (and Iran) have the slightest intention of allowing it to exist is to ignore the history of centuries old intolerance directed against both Christian and Jew.

Following World War One, England and France divided the remains of the Ottoman Empire that had chosen to side with Germany. It would have died sooner or later of its own dead weight, but it was Sir Percy Zachariah Cox who would take out “a map and a pencil to draw the boundary between Iraq and the Nejd (now Saudi Arabia). The borders with Syria and Transjordan were defined similarly.”

There were Arab leaders, but they were generally the pawns of the great powers, frequently assassinated or deposed. With some exceptions, the nations of the Middle East continue to be ruled by monarchs and despots.

As the British Empire shrank in the wake of World War Two and American power grew only one thing is clear. Neither of these imperial powers had any clue, nor way of dealing with the Middle East’s regressive Islamic fanaticism that remains a ceaseless threat to Western civilization. And, as in past times, the debates rage about staying in or getting out.

Every day in the Middle East is Groundhog Day.

On Monday, September 28, Jews around the world will celebrate Yom Kippur, fasting and seeking to begin the new lunar year with a clean slate. The holy day is traditionally celebrated after one has paid debts and sought forgiveness for any wrongs.

For the Israelis, in 1973, it included having to go to war after a sneak attack by Syria and Egypt.

It is not a coincidence that the Muslim month of Ramadan occurs during this same period. Muhammad borrowed a lot of Judaism, but he brought to his new religion some decidedly Arab traits and one of them was intolerance. When a Jewish tribe residing in Arabia refused to acknowledge him as the prophet of Allah, he had all the men executed and the women and children sold into slavery.

When Muslims captured Jerusalem, Judaism’s and Christianity’s most holy city, they chose a site sacred to Jews to build a mosque, al Qud, on the Temple Mount. In Islamic mythology, it is the site where Mohammad ascended to Heaven to meet his fellow prophets after flying to Jerusalem in a dream. There is no indication he ever set foot in Israel, nor is Jerusalem even mentioned by name in the Koran. One of the reasons for the Crusades was to restore Jerusalem to its rightful owners.

In a fashion that Jews and Christians can never quite understand, Islam insists that it is the only religion that should be practiced on the planet. While it gives lip service to Judaism and Christianity because the two faiths have a holy book, it holds Hinduism, Buddhism, and other faiths in complete contempt for lack of a similar scripture.

Americans should pay attention when, on Friday, September 24, some in the American Islamic community hope to bring together up to 50,000 Muslims to surround the U.S. Capitol for Jummah prayer, otherwise known as their Sabbath, celebrated on Fridays, just as Jews do.

The Capitol celebration will be led by Sheikh Ahmed Dewider, a Manhattan cleric who reportedly once said that “through the domination of Islam and its ideas, the White House will change” and expressed the hope that someday the White House would become the Muslim House.

According to The New York Times, the main organizer of the event, Hassen Ibn Abedellah, was “the most aggressively combative of the lawyers” representing the terrorists who staged the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Abdellah has claimed that Zionists “control the government, the politics, the economy, and the media in the U.S.”

Thus, the Friday event will be led by men who are both anti-Semitic and who harbor dreams of turning America into a Muslim nation subject to Sharia, Islamic law.

Occupied elsewhere, President Obama will not be able to participate, but he was also too busy to participate in the National Day of Prayer, acknowledging it with a perfunctory proclamation. Busy as he is, he did host a White House dinner celebrating what he called “The Holy Month of Ramadan” and recently issued a proclamation at the end of Ramadan which concluded with an Arabic blessing.

I suggest Friday’s Capitol event is part of Islam’s endless jihad against all other faiths and reflects its ambitions for the United States of America.

Editor’s Note: Our thanks to the American Family Association for their contribution to this commentary.

Iran has been at war with the United States for thirty years.

When one’s life spans time from the beginning of World War Two, the decades of the Cold War, and the emergence of rogue regimes in Libya, North Korea, Venezuela, Iraq and Iran, you develop an instinct for spotting the enemies of freedom. Russia and China never leave the radar screen.

Following World War Two, America entered into a long period called the Cold War and the stakes could not have been higher. It would last from 1945 until 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

We had entered the “Atomic age.” Though the threat was great, no one believed that the leaders of the Soviet Union were ever crazy enough to actually use nuclear weapons. The strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction worked for both adversaries and still does, but that is not the case with Iran.

From the earliest days of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, its leaders were determined to acquire nuclear weapons and the missiles with which to deliver them. From the beginning, America was always identified as Iran’s greatest enemy, the “Great Satan”, while Israel was called the “Little Satan.”

It is criminally stupid, if not insane, to believe that Iran will not use its nuclear weapons.

I repeat: Iran has been at war with the United States since the inception of the Islamic revolution in 1979. Defying all international laws, Iran seized American diplomats and held them hostage for 444 days, waiting for the inauguration of President Reagan before releasing them. One of the “students” who participated in that outrage was Mamoud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran.

This is a nation that has embraced taking hostages, political assassinations, suicide bombings that killed American Marines in Beirut and, later, the bombing the Khobar Towers in eastern Saudi Arabia. In the wake of 9/11, Iran provided sanctuary to al Qaeda leaders fleeing U.S. forces.

Iran is ruled by a psychotic, criminal regime.

Dr. Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, has written “The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Iran Defies the West.” It details Iran’s determination to acquire the ability to build its own nuclear weapons and to deliver them with missiles.

From the day Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized control of Iran, its subsequent leaders have been working toward an Islamic Armageddon that defies the imagination.

On December 14, 200l, Ali Akbar Rafasanjani said, “The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would totally destroy Israel, while the same against the Islamic world would only cause damage”, adding “Such a scenario is not inconceivable.”

“From 1979 to 2009,” writes Dore, “Iran was consistently prepared to take incredible risks to confront the United States.”

President Obama appears to be oblivious to the long history of Iranian aggression as he pursues a strategy of “soft power” through apologies to the Muslim Middle East and seeking direct negotiations with Iran.

Iran has always used negotiations to achieve its nuclear goals and it has always used deception as the primary means to do so. It “negotiated” with the European Union while buying time to build its nuclear weapons capacity. Iran is not pursuing a “civilian” use of nuclear power.

From Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, any show of American weakness has only emboldened Iran’s plan to assert hegemony over the Middle East and to carry the Islamic revolution to the rest of the world.

“In the absence of a U.S. response to successive Iranian provocations, Iran did not sit back quietly, but exploited what it perceived as western weakness by adopting a policy of continuing escalation,” says Gold. And he is right.

The U.S., Europe, and nations in the Middle East cannot—dare not—assume that Iran will not use nuclear weapons. Just the opposite. Its unique Shiite belief that only an Armageddon of massive death and chaos can bring about the “return” of the Twelfth Imam, a mythical figure that will impose Islam on the entire world, propels Iran toward a nuclear war. It is a belief that is critical to an understanding of the psychology of the leaders of Iran today.

This is why, twice in the past, Israel has destroyed nuclear facilities in the Middle East, first in Iraq in the1980s and more recently in Syria. It literally has no choice other than to destroy Iranian facilities.

Negotiations will not work.

Economic sanctions will not work.

United Nations resolutions will not work.

The world, the United States, and Israel are rapidly running out of options.

We are all rapidly running out of time.

It is one of those coincidences that is, at the same time, so odd and so apt that it requires analysis.

Both Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda and Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events, have come to the same conclusion about President Barack Hussein Obama and virtually on the same day.

When two such disparate individuals, separated by half a globe, conclude that Obama has rendered himself “powerless”—bin Laden’s word and “weakened”—Babbin’s description, you have to take notice.

Commenting two days after the 9/11 anniversary, bin Laden redundantly blamed America’s relationship with Israel for attacks and promised that “all we will do is continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes,” during an 11-minute video that showed a still photo with a voice-over.

Babbin calls Obama “the incredibly shrinking president”, who has become weakened in his first eight months in office by domestic objectives to the point that he has taken his eye off the ball when it comes to international threats “at least as old as bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa of war against the United States.”

Babbin worries that Osama is clueless regarding the impending Iranian goal of producing enough fissionable material to make its own atomic bombs and nuclear tipped missiles. He reminds readers that, in June, Osama’s Cairo speech “green-lighted Iran’s nuclear program by saying, ‘I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not. No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.’”

Translation: The U.S., under Obama’s administration, will do nothing to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. “Weakened by anger and naivete,” says Babbin, “Obama is incapable of dealing with Iran. On Iraq and Afghanistan, the news is no better.”

Bin Laden is of the same opinion! Noting that Obama retained Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense from the Bush administration, bin Laden said, “Reasonable people knew that Obama is a powerless man who will not be able to end the war as he promised.”

It must really suck to be President of the United States and have bin Laden and Jed Babbin, along with two million folks who showed up on September 12, tell you they think you’re an idiot and a weakling to boot.

A third voice requires our attention and it is Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 to 1999. Dr. Gold has a new book, “The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West.”

Dr. Gold takes the U.S. and Western nations to task for their long and tepid response to Tehran’s openly declared intention to become a nuclear power.

Iran’s Mamoud Ahmadinejad has made no secret of the fact that he wants to “wipe Israel from the map” and one of its ayatollahs has mused that Iran could afford to lose a million or more of its people to achieve that goal.

Dr. Dore warns that, “Few understand the significance of the moment the world is facing. A nuclear Iran involves the merger between radical Islam and nuclear weapons technology,” adding that “a nuclear Iran will be able to offer a protective, nuclear umbrella over al Qaeda or any group, allowing it to strike with impunity.”

“In short, says Dr. Dore, “a nuclear Iran will totally alter the international security environmental, setting the stage for a new scale of terrorist threats that the world has not yet witnessed.”

A lot of people find reasons to deplore Israel, but I suspect they will be greatly relieved if that tiny nation does what a great power like the U.S. won’t do.

Unless Iran’s nuclear facilities are destroyed, no American, no European, no Russian, no Chinese, and no one in the Middle East will be safe from the chaos Iran’s leaders want in order to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam, a mythical Shiite figure.

You cannot talk to or negotiate with people who are crazy.

In my pre-9/11 commentary, “9/11 Eight Years Later and No Safer”, I took brief notice that the role of the Central Intelligence Agency to gather intelligence in order to avoid other terrorist attacks has been greatly circumscribed since the days when its operatives swiftly arrived in Afghanistan and organized its northern tribes to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda.

As Dr. Walid Phares recently wrote in “Seven Years of War, One Year of Retreat”, the nation’s failure to identify the enemy, Arab jihadism, includes apologies to Muslims, many of whom celebrated 9/11. “In no conflict throughout history were people still confused about the threat eight years after hostilities began,” wrote Dr. Phares. His concern is that “the bureaucratic machine didn’t fight this war; in fact it pushed to fail and eventually crumble.”

There is a raging debate in America today about how much bureaucracy we want to endure at the federal and other levels. The Founding Fathers wanted the least amount of government interference or intrusion into our lives, but enough government to defend us.

In 2008, “Homeland Insecurity” was published by the History Publishing Company. Its authors were Terry D. Turchie and Kathleen M. Puckett, Ph.D. Both had long careers in the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the former having been Deputy Assistant Director of Counterterrorism and the latter as a Special Agent focused on cases involving foreign counterintelligence and domestic and international terrorism.

What we know in the aftermath of 9/11 was that a “wall” existed that prevented the sharing of intelligence between agencies engaged in counterintelligence. In 1995 during the Clinton era, “Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick developed formal procedures to further restrict sharing information between the criminal and intelligence sides,” noted the authors and “Incredibly, Jamie Gorelick became a member of the 9/11 Commission…”

Louis J. Freeh, former Director of the FBI, in his memoir, “My FBI”, noted that “By the fall of 1998, I had been Bill Clinton’s top cop for half a decade, but he hadn’t spoken to me in two years.” Recall that, barely months after Clinton took the oath of office in 1993, the first attack on the Twin Towers took place. In July, FBI agents prevented another Islamist plot to bomb New York targets.

Such commissions usually exist to pin the blame on some government agency or agencies for failure. According to the authors, “Contrary to popular opinion, prior to 9/11 the FBI and CIA continuously shared information related to worldwide terrorism.”

“The legal monstrosity of the Wall did less to protect innocent Americans than it did harm to the intricate process of ‘connecting the dots’ that is part of any effective national security apparatus.”

What emerges from “Homeland Insecurity” is a picture of political interference and opposition to anti-terror efforts to protect the nation that left the nation at risk.

“Contrary to the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission and public statements of so many politicians, the Bureau (along with the CIA) was one of the very few federal agencies taking terrorism seriously in the years before 9/11.”

The authors are no less scathing in their criticisms of the Bush administration era which was just as politicized as Clinton’s. “This political groupthink dominated the government after 9/11 and was just as responsible for the road to Iraq as the president’s decision to mount the invasion.”

So it is politics and the riches to be had in huge defense contracts that continue to determine the judgments made regarding the nation’s security. This is the nature of the beast on which the lives of Americans depend.

Dr. Phares believes that, “In short, the U.S. War on Terror is over, but the Jihadists’ war on democracies will go on.”

We come now to Obama’s Attorney General, Erik Holder, to whom the present Director of the FBI must answer. Holder is pursuing a witch hunt within the CIA regarding an alleged torture policy that was vetted and cleared by DOJ lawyers during the Bush era.

This shift in focus, a political judgment, suggests that efforts to uncover and thwart new terror plots against the United States are getting less attention than they should.

This is a virtual guarantee of yet another terrorist attack on the United States.

9/11/2009 took a large psychic toll on Americans.

I am no exception. By early evening, I found myself profoundly angry watching the Mayor of New York explain why Ground Zero is still essentially a hole in the ground eight years after the destruction of the Twin Towers.

This nation fought and won World War Two in four years’ time and in two separate theatres of war in the Pacific and in Europe. By the time it was over, the major cities of Germany and Japan were rubble and both armies and civilians were among the dead because the only way to convince an enemy to stop waging war is to destroy their will to continue.

History tells us this over and over again. It is the reason the Romans laid siege to Masada.

We have been in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. What we’ve been doing there is more a police action than a war.

That’s why the Korean War is officially called a United Nations police action, not a war. We settled for a stalemate.

When there were riots in Los Angeles and Newark that was a police action using the military. What we are asking our troops to do these days in far off, dangerous places is not a war.

We have reached a point where the present administration will not even call it a war. It doesn’t get more pathetic than that.

So, as I looked at that hole in the ground in lower Manhattan, I wondered why, if the owner of that vast property, the developer, had been able to completely rebuild other structures and rent them out, why the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had been unable or unwilling to rebuild the Twin Towers?

They have the blueprints!

What better way to tell America’s enemies, the fanatical al Qaeda—the spear point of the Islamic Jihad—that they could not and would not defeat us?

In World War Two we knew who the enemy was. We named them and we created a great war machine to utterly destroy them.

More than a half century later, our government will not say “terrorists”, cannot say “Islamists,” and all the while, the center of the Islamic Revolution, Iran, relentlessly works to acquire its own nuclear weapons.

There is a proper place for several “ground zeros” and they are the known sites where Iran is refining the fissionable material for nuclear weapons and building missiles.

Meanwhile, why must I watch interviews in front of a hole in the ground that is eight years old?

Ground Zero is an American disgrace.

As one drove into New York from New Jersey in the years before 9/11, there was an ellipse of roadway that gently curved into the waiting entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel. From there you could see the Twin Towers in the distance, across the river, dominating the lower end of Manhattan.

It bespoke the nation’s economic strength, its international outreach, its capacity to build two such impressive skyscrapers, made more so by their architectural simplicity. They gleamed in the rays of the Sun. They mirrored the silver Moon.

I had occasion to dine in Windows on the World restaurant several times, high atop one of the towers. A wall of windows ringed the restaurant and one could look at New Jersey on one side and Brooklyn on the other. A walk around that restaurant took in all the boroughs from that great height and there, down in the vast harbor, one could see the Statue of Liberty. So high up were you that it seemed a small thing from that distance.

If I wanted to strike at America’s confidence, America’s bravado, America’s dominance, I would have destroyed the Twin Towers and, of course, that is exactly what Osama bin Laden did.

Our response at the time was to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan and, in the process, try to kill bin Laden. Neither objective has been achieved. That is because the Middle East is an ancient place enthralled by an ancient religion that roots all present actions in the Arab culture of the seventh century A.D. when it was invented by Mohammed.

They have made little progress in modernizing thought or action. They were and they are the barbarians at the gates.

The Twin Towers were all about modernity and the future. Islam is all about the past and about the demand that it be imposed on the present and the future. These are people who journey to Mecca in order to circle a structure housing a stone!

Every year when September 11th comes around, we must remind ourselves of the triumph of our Constitution, our dedication to freedom and liberty, and our capacity to defeat the enemies of these inalienable rights.

Our grandparents defeated the Nazis and the imperialistic Japanese. Then they and our parents held steadfast against the Soviets for nearly five decades. We fought in Korea and we fought in Vietnam. The current generation’s bravest and best have been fighting our enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We must draw on the reservoir of courage they bequeathed us and, for my part, we must never let lose of the anger we felt eight years ago when a handful of evil men attacked the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, with yet another intended target.

Al Qaeda? Hunt them! Find them! Kill them!

Do not listen to the appeasers, the Blame America crowd. Surrender is not an option.

In November 2008, I wrote of Afghanistan, “Having lived through the long years of the war in Vietnam, I can tell you that Afghanistan looks and smells like Vietnam. It is the classic wrong war in the wrong place.”

I still think the U.S. should leave. I don’t like having to pack up and abandon Afghanistan to its fate, but Afghanistan’s fate has been fought over for centuries and, in the modern era, it has defied any invasion or intrusion into its affairs.

It is in a very bad neighborhood that includes Russia, Iran, and the worst basket case of all, Pakistan. The Afghans and Pakistanis mutually despise each other.

When someone like Adm. Mike Mullen, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says that the situation in Afghanistan has been “deteriorating” over the past few years and that the “Taliban insurgency has gotten more sophisticated”, as he did on August 23, you better pay attention.

More importantly, the White House had better pay attention. The Admiral is trying to send it a message. He said, for example, he was “extremely concerned” about the recent bombings in Iraq. Speaking on CNN’s ‘State of the Nation’, it was no secret that the man overseeing the greatest military on Earth was warning that it is ill-equipped to deal with insurgencies short of the massive infusion of manpower.

We tried that in Vietnam. It didn’t work. The former Soviets tried that in Afghanistan. It didn’t work. The invasions were successful in turning both places into slaughterhouses. History cries out against foreign engagement in this feeble excuse for a nation.

The U.S. justification for the waging of war is because 9/11 was planned there. It is a fallacy. The next attack on America can be planned anywhere. Al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan to do that.

Specifically, the last general charged with succeeding in Afghanistan asked for and was denied 10,000 more troops. Then he was replaced.

All during the long years of the war in Vietnam, Americans were told that another increase of troops would turn the tide, but we know now what the White House knew then; there was no indigenous enthusiasm for the South Vietnamese generals and even less for the Americans. Both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon knew we could not win a war there and some 57,000 American dead is their ugly legacy.

We have been in Afghanistan since 9/11 when we enjoyed an initial success chasing out the Taliban and al Qaeda. That was accomplished, not by a massive U.S. troop infusion, but by hiring its northern tribes who were opposed to the Taliban, intruders from across the border in Pakistan, in combination with our extraordinary air power. Earlier, during the years of the Soviet invasion, the U.S. provided massive amounts of money and weapons to Afghan tribes, some which were led by notorious drug lords.

The Taliban are back. The Afghans are tired of American troops in their midst and you can largely dismiss the smaller numbers of troops from “coalition” nations because they are window-dressing. This does not diminish the casualties they have sustained, but it does acknowledge their very reluctant participation.

Long ago, the British learned that Afghanistan is a place where empires go to die.

Virtually every military expert agrees that Afghanistan is the last place on Earth for a modern army to wage war and that includes every NATO general. It no doubt includes the Russians whose invasion ultimately brought down the former Soviet Union. That whole game was part of the larger Cold War.

Afghanistan never was much of a “nation” though it was relatively calm when Afghan dynasties ruled from around the 1700s into the last century. In terms of foreign policy, the U.S. had largely ignored Afghanistan for decades.

The notion that democracy as practiced in the West can be transplanted there is farcical though some previous Afghan regimes had made progress to free women from Islamic subjugation. Efforts toward modernization have always been painfully slow there.

Since the 1700s the primary export from Afghanistan has been heroin and it remains so today. Other than growing poppies, there’s not much that passes for an economy there. It doesn’t matter who’s elected because the business of Afghanistan is opium. American troops will not alter that.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on since 2001, but Americans dislike long wars. We fought a long one and a wrong one in Vietnam. They serve no purpose. Our military exists to kill people and smash things. Nation building is not one of its skill sets, nor should it be.

Right now Americans are distracted by the battles over the hideous healthcare reform bill and Cap-and-Trade. Americans rightfully fear that those in control of our government are deliberately bankrupting the nation. In increasing numbers they have concluded that electing Obama president was a very bad idea.

It is unfortunate that we measure wars by the number of casualties, but they will continue in Afghanistan and, when Americans at last turn their collective attention to them, the pressure to withdraw from Afghanistan will mount.

I confess that the strategic reasons for being there defy my understanding, other than its proximity to Pakistan. It sounds to me like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wants to leave and for very good reasons that date back at least three centuries and longer.

The war on terror will go on until we kill as many of the leadership of al Qaeda as possible. When it becomes too lethal to join al Qaeda, its members will go back to herding goats. It is a war that can and should be fought covertly and as viciously as possible.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Arabs, Arab culture, or Arab history, but I do know a bit about our own as Americans. And that worries me.

While our American values are deep-seated and enduring, our short-term memories are such that we have to be severely provoked to call on them. We tend to forget the many attacks and abuses Americans have suffered at home and abroad at the hands of Arabs and others of the Muslim faith.

I was thinking about this while watching Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, greet the returning “hero” of the Lockerbie bombing that, in December 1988, killed all 259 passengers on board, many of whom were returning college students and eleven on the ground in Scotland. A large crowd showed up to cheer for Abdel Basset al-Megrahi.

As this is being written, all across the Arab world, this acknowledged Libyan intelligence officer is being portrayed as an innocent victim of the Lockerbie bombing; someone wrongly convicted of being part of the plot. That’s what the Arab press is saying. There is virtually no crime an Arab commits that cannot be explained away so long as it involves revenge for one of their long-standing grievances.

My mind went back to the images of the Palestinians who went in the streets when they heard news of the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They, too, cheered.

In Somalia, in the wake of the Black Hawk helicopter that went down in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 some of our dead warriors were dragged through the streets while crowds cheered.

When news of the abuses at Abu Graib prison became known, Americans were outraged, but in prisons across the whole of the Middle East, such abuses and much worse are commonplace. American values, however, would not permit them to go unpunished.

For three decades, Saddam Hussein maintained rape rooms and executions proceeded without trials in Abu Graib and elsewhere within his prison regime. This does not excuse what a handful of American military did, but it does put it in some perspective.

By contrast, the detainees at Guantanamo have received humane treatment with the exception of those whose information served to protect and save American lives. Even our so-called “torture” methods (enhanced interrogation) do not leave those on the receiving end maimed or dead. Ironically, our pilots and other members of the military have been subjected to water-boarding in order to prepare them for this procedure if captured.

No, it is the cheers that bother me most. It is the joy that infuses Arabs and other Muslims celebrating the killing of Americans that is a reflection of some very bad values that have kept them despised for centuries. They are values embraced by those who join or support al Qaeda or the Taliban.

So, in the wake of the latest bombing in Baghdad, I was amused to see a man-in-the-street interview with an Iraqi who complained that the American soldiers had been withdrawn too soon. He wanted them and the security they provided back.

That is the case all over the world. Our military is seemingly never welcome until after they are gone and the same threats to peace in the streets and a nation occur again.

Then there is no cheering. Only pleas for our return.

Referring to a 1990 report in The Economist, the editors recently said, “To revisit the Arab world two decades later is to find that in many ways history continues to pass the Arabs by. Freedom? The Arabs are ruled now, as they were then, by a cartel of authoritarian regimes practiced in the arts of oppression.”

The central problem affecting the Middle East and much of northern Africa where Arabs rule is Islam. The Islam of the Middle East is utterly resistant to change. Not all of the world’s billion-plus Muslims practice Islam with the same intensity as many Arabs do (and we should note, as Iran’s Persians have pursued since their revolution in 1979.)

Trying to understand Arabs is like trying to find one’s way out of one of those cornfield mazes where most turns lead to a dead end. In a recent analysis by Herb Keinon in the Jerusalem Post the lament was familiar. It referred to a meeting in Khartoum after the loss of the 1967 war on Israel in which the participants agreed to the “Three No’s”; no to peace with Israel, no to recognition of Israel, and no to negotiations with Israel.

Reflecting the observations of The Economist, Keinon wrote that Syria still regards its loss of the Golan Heights and its demand for its return as “non-negotiable.” Add to that a meeting of Fatah rejected Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s call for a Palestinian recognition of Israel. This reflects the position of Hamas as well. And, finally, at a recent event at the U.S. State Department Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said that Israel could forget about any confidence-building measures from that nation.

In starkest terms, the Obama administration efforts to “re-set” its relations with the Middle East have hit the same brick wall that all previous administrations encountered. You cannot negotiate with people who have no intention to negotiate. The Israelis cannot find a partner for negotiations with the Palestinians because Fatah and Hamas would far prefer to kill one another than sit down together.

The Economist’s 14-page report, titled “Waking from its Sleep” correctly noted that there is no unanimity among the various Arab nations and not all Arabs are on the same page in much the same fashion as being “European” means different things to those identified as such. Nor are most of the world’s Muslims Arabs. Indeed, other than Israel, the only thing the Middle East’s Arabs agree upon is the common danger posed by Iran, a Muslim, but Persian nation.

On the political front, the Arab League “does little more than organize bad-tempered summits” and works “to fend off Western criticism of human-rights abuses by its members and (to) denounce Israel.”

It is a curious irony of history that neither the ancient Romans, nor modern American people ever wanted to create an empire, but both ended up in charge of one in an effort to fend off the enemies of peace. In the case of Rome, its allies asked for Roman protection and, in the case of America, following World War II, it emerged as the only superpower capable of fending off the threat of the Soviet Union and capable of interceding to stop conflicts.

America’s protection is understood to be the only reliable one worldwide and accounts for the many bases it maintains on the invitation of its many allies. Following WWII, America determined to stay in Europe to avoid a repeat of WWI and to fend off Soviet aggression. It helped found both the U.N. and NATO.

There is a further irony in the fact that the Arab nations in the Middle East are all fervently praying that Israel destroys the Iranian nuclear facilities in the same way it previously did in Iraq and, more recently, in Syria.

Is change coming to the Middle East? Yes, but it is likely to be very ugly and violent. Most of the nations are the product of British and French colonization following World War I that cobbled together the new “nations” such as Iraq and Jordan out of a desire to extend their own empires of trade.

As for Afghanistan, that ancient “nation” has been little more than warring tribes for millennia. Invaders have never had any success there though the goal of destroying al Qaeda and the Taliban is a sensible, necessary one.

America’s intervention, particularly after 9/11, was the act of an empire seeking to impose some measure of peace in the face of the rise of Al Qaeda and the endless wars by Saddam Hussein on his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait. Peace is the last thing that is likely to break out in the Middle East whose vast reserves of oil require that the West continue to intervene to protect its dependence on it.

“It is not difficult,” noted The Economist, “to paint a bleak picture of Arab failure, based on a broad spectrum of underperformance in investment, productivity, trade, education, social development, and even culture.” Thanks to Islam, it remains rooted in the seventh century sensibilities of marauding bands of Arabian tribes led by Mohammed that spread the “faith.” To this day, hardcore Muslims believe that the entire world must bend to Islam’s dreams of a caliphate, a single religion, and the brutal justice of Sharia law.

Thus, while Americans believe that more democracy is the answer to the problems of the region, what “democracy” that actually exists there is a sham. Despite the presence of parliaments, all real power resides with the monarchies and their governments are rubber stamps for the despots of varying descriptions.

One factor will have a significant role in the Mideast’s future and that is population. “By next year the region’s population will have doubled over 30 years from fewer than 180 million people to some 360 million.” The majority of Arabs are under 25 years old. That is a recipe for revolution and war.

What too many in the West desire is not attainable. The West wants the region to adopt a measure of justice and freedom that took hundreds of years to develop in its own area of the world. As a huge population of young Arabs seeks some measure of real freedom, they will likely turn to revolution and rebellion to achieve it. Or they may unite through sheer numbers to impose Sharia law on the West in a misguided attempt to determine their own fate. This factor is already transforming Europe with its growing Muslim population.

If there is one thing common to the Mideast it is their infinite capacity to blame everyone other than themselves for their own wretched state of oppression and lack of progress.

Meanwhile, the United States is desperately trying to restructure its own financial mess thanks to profligate spending and borrowing. Much of the West and the prosperity of trading partners such as China and Europe depend on this. Failure could plunge the world into chaos.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has chosen to turn power over to the first Marxist President ever elected and to a Congress dominated by a Democrat Party whose socialist inclinations threaten to bankrupt the nation with insane taxation of all energy use and a huge bureaucratic program to nationalize its healthcare system.

None of this bodes well for the future and the likelihood of wars, large and small, in the Middle East, spreading out to engulf the rest of the world remains a nightmare scenario.

According to the August 6 DEBKAfile, the three American hostages that Iran is now holding are all likely to be declared “Israeli spies” and put on trial as such. That’s a hanging offense.

Frankly, my first thought was this: How STUPID do you have to be (a) American, (b) Jewish, and (c) hiking along an unidentified area close to the border or possibly in Iran?

My second thought was: Since all three have writing credits with legitimate publications, might they, like the two Chinese-American girls, also be considered “journalists”? And, if so, is there a private plane warming up to send former President Clinton to do some official or unofficial groveling on behalf of the greatest superpower in the world?

That’s not going to happen.

The three hostages are Shane Bauer from California who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, and New American Media, all liberal to the core. I suspect young Bauer will return, if he is not hung, a conservative.

His partner, Sarah Short, also from California, writes for Matador, whatever that is, and Joshua Steel Petel, from Oregon, a former yeshiva student, writes for Jewish Week. Oy!

They range in age from 27 to 30. How does one reach the age of 30 and not know that Iran has been hostile to the United States and Israel since its Islamist Revolution in 1979?

How does one conclude that a hike along Iran’s border does not constitute a distinct threat? Petel’s family had its origins in Iraq and had emigrated to the United States. Did no one tell him that leaving Iraq was a very good idea for a Jew and that returning there was a very bad one?

Obama, like all liberals, has never met a dictator he did not like, but Mamoud Ahmadinejad may prove a problem. For one thing, he’s miffed that Obama did not send him a note of congratulations after his “election” victory. You know, the one that brought Iranians out in the streets of Tehran to protest it?

Mamoud must have fell to his knees, faced Mecca, and thanked Allah for providing him three of the most stupid Americans, all Jews, as a means to jerk Obama around. But does he know that Obama doesn’t like Israelis and/or Jews? Just ask his pastor of twenty years, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

In the same way the taking of U.S. diplomats in 1979 put an end to President Jimmy Carter’s first and last term in office, these three dimwits may just provide the same exit for Obama unless he can somehow extricate them.

The question—which will be shrouded in darkness—will be the asking price. It’s the kind of answer that distorts foreign policy because Obama will be thinking about himself, not the hostages.

A former Prime Minister of England, Harold MacMillan, was once asked what he feared most and his answer was, “Events, old chap, events.”

The three hostages are now an event.

I recently read an interesting book by Christopher Kelly, “The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and The Fall of Rome.” Our popular image of Attila is that of a barbaric pagan, but Priscus of Panium set off to meet Attila in 449 AD and, as Kelly relates, “Attila turned out to be surprisingly civilized and a dangerously shrewd player of international politics.”

It’s always a good idea to review one’s assumptions about the world in which one lives, such as the current politically correct view that Islam is “a religion of peace” and that the barbarity of Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Arab groups is an anomaly, the result of their incorrect interpretation of the Koran. Their interpretation, however, is quite accurate and the Koran is a call to arms and battle plan for the conquest of the world.

From America’s earliest years, it has had to deal with marauding Arabs and in modern times we have put our troops in harm’s way in the Middle East in Beirut in the 1980s and to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraq out of Kuwait in August 1990.

Following 9/11 we returned in 2001 to drive Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan. They took refuge in the frontier provinces of Pakistan and have since returned to the killing fields of our choosing…if killing one’s sworn enemies can be called a choice.

On March 20, 2003, the Second Gulf War was launched against Iraq and we are now beginning to withdraw troops from Iraq’s cities. A large contingent of U.S. military will remain in Iraq. At the same time, there has been a buildup of troops in Afghanistan. Historically, no empire has ever successfully conquered or subdued the Afghani tribes and, in modern times, the most recent effort brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is generally agreed that the real threat to Mideast stability is Iran and that the shakiest nation in the region is Pakistan.

History teaches us that the emperors of the Roman Empire had to make choices about where they too would place their troops throughout the vast expanse under their control; it surrounded the Mediterranean which they called Mare Nostrum, our sea.

At the end of his book, Kelly asks “What makes great empires endure or collapse? How do governments defend their actions? What causes the breakup of a leviathan superstate? When is it right to go to war, or purchase peace, or pay off an enemy? These are issues of enduring importance.”

When an empire gets too large for its militarily and financially resources to maintain, it becomes highly vulnerable. An empire, too, depends on its alliances. When they go bad, the empire—any empire—is in trouble.

The Roman Empire fell for many reasons, but chief among them was the relentless arithmetic of demography, the movement of populations of people.

The Romans regarded the Goths and Vandals as “barbarians”, but the Goth tribes were people who were just as challenged by the Huns as the Romans and they were on the move to find more land for their growing population. In doing so, they crossed the Danube to trespass on Roman lands in France, in Spain, and down into Northern Africa.

By contrast, “the Huns seemingly offered no moral or religious justification, however thin or unconvincing. They sought neither to find a new homeland on Roman territory nor to glorify themselves as heroic freedom fighters warring down a harsh imperial regime.”

“The Huns appear more brutal precisely because they had no known motive for their raids beyond the acquisition of booty and captives.” This last observation is particularly important because the rise of Islam can be traced directly to the same purpose. It was, however, masked by Mohammed’s promise of paradise for anyone who fell in battle and servitude for those conquered.

Here’s where the similarities between America and the ancient Romans get really interesting. At the same time the nation engages Islamic terrorism, our national sovereignty—the integrity of our borders—is being challenged as not just thousands, but millions have invaded to take up residence among us. This repeats the pattern that brought down the Roman Empire.

Having forsaken universal conscription, the U.S. depends on an all-voluntary military to project our power. The Romans, toward the end, often allied with the Goths to fight the Huns and, on occasion, allied with the Huns as well. With the exception of the British, Canadians and Australians, our military allies are mostly for show.

Not only is our financial stability at risk, but since the 1960s, the level of decadence in our society has risen, reflected in popular culture and media. Our primary and secondary educational system has become an abject failure.

Recently, while in Russia, President Obama said, “The future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground.”

This ignores the entire history of civilization. It is criminally naïve. The future, just as in the past, will belong to whoever has the greatest military with the financial power and the willingness to use it.

Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

And as John Adams warned, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.”

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center – he blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com .

Bit by bit the news is getting out. First it was a news report of Israelis, Egyptians, and Saudis getting together to discuss their mutual interests and concern. In other words, Iran!

Now The Times (UK) is reporting that “The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.”

This was followed by news of an ABC News interview with Vice President Biden who said, “Look, Israel can determine for itself—it’s a sovereign nation—what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else, whether we agree or not.”

Translation: We hope they will bomb the heck out of Iran’s nuclear facilities because we do not have the guts to do it ourselves. The President then said Biden had misspoken and that no “green light” had been given. Apparently, it’s okay to “meddle” in Israel’s internal affairs, but not Iran’s.

The least likely partners in the Middle East are Israel and the Saudis, but both have a common enemy and the Saudis have always been shrewd in their judgment as to whom to back in a fight. They also prefer having others do their fighting for them. Unless you haven’t checked lately, Saudi Arabia shares a very long border with Iraq and is just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, along with Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

So now the Saudis are in league with the Israelis, just like they coordinate with the oil-importing United States of America. Why not? We’re too stupid to tap our own extensive national oil reserves, so they are perfectly happy to sell us theirs.

Iran is a direct competitor to the Saudis and cannot be expected to play nice at OPEC meetings. The good news for the Saudis is that the Iranians have so mismanaged their oil industry that they don’t even have a refinery to make their own gasoline. Their equipment is getting old and their income from oil is surely dwindling as a result. It doesn’t help them that the price per barrel is falling of late.

But they sure do know how to make some great long-and-short range missiles and have been hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapon capability for some twenty years or more. While they have poured billions into that little project, they have ignored their own population which has high unemployment and a host of other problems, not the least of which is a shaky hold on power.

A serious international boycott of the current Iranian regime would bring it to its knees. The protests in the streets may have been crushed, but the spirit of protest has not. Iranians are angry with their Supreme Leader and the rest of the stooges in their allegedly elected government.

I have no doubt whatever that the Israelis will choose the day and hour to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. It’s no great secret where they are, but I bet the Mossad has blueprints!

It is ironic that Iran has managed to do what sixty years of Arab warfare on Israel has not. It has brought two antagonists to the table to discuss an even greater common enemy.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com . He blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com .