THE LOW POST: An Undeniable Embarrassment

The second thing that happened is that the nation of Iran hosted an "academic conference" to consider the "scientific question" of whether the Holocaust took place. Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, opened the conference by attacking what he termed Western restrictions on "scientific and scholarly study," saying that the West did not allow Holocaust denial because it would lead to questions about the nature of the Israeli state. Following Mottaki was our own David Duke, who claimed that the West had a "Holocaust mafia" that squelched dissent on the issue.

Let it be noted for the record that one very good reason that the United States did not recognize this excellent event by dropping a MOAB in the middle of it is that our President Bush was more or less exactly at that moment meeting with an important Iranian ally to beg for help in untangling America's hopeless political mess in Iraq. And while we can't give Ahmadinejad credit for planning this sequence of events -- the Holocaust conference was announced long before al-Hakim's visit -- there's no doubt that the general trend of his diplomacy in the past years, as opposed to Bush's anyway, laid the foundation for this incredible political checkmate. Conceived as a blow to the heart of Islamic extremism, Bush's insane pursuit of the Iraqi democratic mirage has instead forced the United States into the role of a formal appeaser of some of the vilest state ideology seen on earth since Hitler's time. And it couldn't have worked out any better for Ahmadinejad, who in just four years has not only seen the United States take out his most dangerous military enemy in Saddam Hussein, but has seen the conditions laid for both a Shiite resurgence in Iraq and the dealing of a crippling blow to American geopolitical ambitions in the Middle East. It makes one wonder how much the Iranians helped us along down this path to begin with, whether those reports of Ahmed Chalabi chilling in Tehran in the weeks before the war might actually be true. Perhaps future historians will find an alternate source for some of our original "solid information" about Iraqi WMDs.

Who knows. What we do know is that as of last week, we have officially been played like a fiddle by one of the world's all-time evil bastards. And we also now can say for sure that the famed cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Bush-Rove-Cheney crew has been proven to be a crock. Those guys are ruthless when it comes to winning American elections. But when it comes to war and diplomacy, they're a bunch of kittens. You can't Swift-Boat Moqtada al-Sadr. When it comes to real enemies, our leaders are useless.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had a feast this week and his main course was George Bush with an apple in his mouth. Has it ever been more embarrassing to be an American?

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