Dates which live in Infamy

August 22nd, 2006. The date on which the president of Iran promises we will learn the Iranian response to the West's package of incentives offered, foolishly, in my opinion, in exchange for cessation of nuclear development. Will this be our next date to live in infamy?

Logic says it's a ridiculous suggestion - the hysterical rantings of deranged conspiracy theorists desperate for a new story line. But logic doesn't apply in the world of fanatical Islam. Logic is not a component of note in the lives of people who teach their children, almost from birth, that all Westerners are evil Satans who drink human blood for sustenance, that the greatest goal to which they can possibly aspire is to die in martyrdom, taking as many non-believers with them as possible.

Ahmadinejad openly and frequently insists that Israel must be obliterated. The Israeli-Hizb'Allah conflict is only the beginning of his attempts to bring his horrible vision to fruition. While we have wasted precious months and years trying to assemble a package of incentives that will sufficiently tempt this lunatic to renounce his insanity and play nicely with his neighbors, he has quietly assembled his proxy armies - Hizb'Allah in Lebanon, al-Sadr's militia in Iraq, countless other cells worldwide which have yet to be uncovered - built them, armed them, trained them and brainwashed them into irretrievable, expendable masses of humanity, who embrace his vision of the world with as much devotion as we embrace our children. He stated in his interview with Mike Wallace that "If a soldier is afraid of death, he will not be able to defend his land. So he must not be afraid of death." This remark is so significant, yet has been almost completely overlooked.

No fear of death - this is a concept that Westerners cannot grasp. Only a child who has been taught, from the age when we in America begin teaching the ABC's, that this life is a burden to be endured only as part of the path to the paradise of the afterlife can be unafraid of death - can value death more than life, be it his own or that of his neighbors. We must understand their ideology to defeat it. If we value their lives more than they do themselves, we do so at our own peril. We must recognize that there is no such thing as an innocent bystander in their version of the world - we are all equally evil, equally valid targets, the death of an Israeli or American newborn is valued every bit as much as the death of our most hardened soldier. Unless and until we accept this and quit wringing our hands over each civilian casualty we inflict in our attempts to defeat them, we are doomed to failure.

Only Ahmadinejad and his ilk know what he plans for August 22nd. Perhaps he will just defiantly reaffirm his previous statements that Iran will never give up her nuclear technology, and sanctions be damned. It seems quite possible that he will vaguely suggest that the incentives have some promise, are a basis for further negotiation, to continue the stall tactics that have served him so well for so long. But perhaps he has something much more significant in mind, something much more unthinkable to those of us who value this life. The next date which will live in infamy will, I fear, be infamous on a scale previously inconceivable to lovers of liberty and freedom. If it isn't August 22nd, it will be soon.