Ahamdinajad: Osama with a real economy to draw on.

Christopher Hitchesn explains why Ahmadinejad's rhetoric must be taken more seriously than the near ritual calling for "Death to the Zionist entity."

We assumed once that Osama bin Laden was just rehashing typical Arab b.s., and even after he truck-bombed the WTC, killed our Rangers in Mogadishu, bombed the Khobar Towers, the Cole and two of our African embassies, we still ignored him as if he were just some crank.

Despite the Left's insistence that the way to deal with these people is more negotiations while they perfect their nukes, I think I'd rather not repeat that mistake with this creep.

Hitchens also handily dispatches the mewling nitpicking of Juan Cole whose main MO is to flaunt his own knowledge of Asian languages by quibbling over the accuracy of translations using English idioms which have no literal counterpart in those languages. For example, Cole thinks he's defending Ahmadinejad when he writes that he "never uttered the phrase "Israel should be wiped off the map." Of course, no Arab maps depict Israel in the first place, but does that make any difference?