Jimmy Carter is back in the news again. The former president and peanut farmer has been stumping in Nevada for his son, Jack, who is running for the U.S. Senate. True to form, Carter is claiming that President George Bush has brought the United States international disgrace by having the temerity to defend the country against its enemies.

The former president told a crowd of about 300 on the campus of the University of Nevada, Reno today that the nation is more sharply divided that it has ever been as a result of Bush's policies.

The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, he says he's deeply embarrassed that the American government now stands convicted around the world as one of the greatest abusers of civil rights. He continued the theme in a dinner speech to 700 at a Democratic fundraiser tonight, saying every past president has been a supporter of human rights, until this one.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! When will this moron shut up?

Carter's vociferous criticism of Bush violates a longstanding taboo in American politics. Bill Clinton, another failed Democratic ex-president, has eagerly followed this precedent, hurling his own barbs at the Bush Administration. In contrast, the two living Republican ex-presidents, Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, have maintained a much lower and more dignified profile.

As Victor Davis Hanson noted earlier this week, "Carter and Clinton, as self-appointed moral censors, have a bad habit of campaigning for international approval (remember Carter’s embarrassing lobbying for the Nobel Prize) by ankle-biting current American Presidents, and by extension their very alma mater." VDH adds:

The truth? Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are both small-minded men, with a wide mean streak. And for all the smiles and deference to folksy Protestant religion, they display an un-Christian vindictiveness that makes us happy they are not in office. A psychiatrist would diagnose all sorts of neuroses of compensation and projection, their psyches finding overt ways of balancing (and hiding) some very dark emotions.

To this I would add only that the frantic exegeses of Carter and Clinton seem motivated by a desperate desire for approval. But what's done is done. In their hearts these men know that the judgment of History will not be kind.

But Borat will not be silenced. In fact, he showed up at the White House yesterday:

Secret Service agents turned away British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the boorish, anti-Semitic journalist, when he tried to invite "Premier George Walter Bush" to a screening of his upcoming movie, "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan."

Also invited to the screening: O.J. Simpson, "Mel Gibsons" and other "American dignitaries."

Kazakh officials are unhappy about Borat's antics, to say the least. Until recenetly, Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union and best known for the Baikonur Cosmodrome and the rapidly disappearing Aral Sea. But the country is independent now and desperately wants to raise its image in the world in order to attract more foreign investment. According to Reuters, Kazakh officials are eager to "assure the West that, contrary to Borat's claims, theirs is not a nation of drunken anti-Semites who treat their women worse than their donkeys." Best of luck, Kazakhstan.

Borat, of course, doesn't need luck. Are you kidding? You can't buy publicity like this.

For more: Check out these YouTube clips of Borat's antics. And keep your eyes peeled for the November edition of Vanity Fair.

Over the last several weeks the Newark (New Jersey) Star-Ledger has featured a series of articles by reporter Nawal Qarooni on everyday life in Iran.  In the latest installment, Qarooni looks at the dating scene in Tehran and Shiraz, two of Iran's major cities.

During three weeks of interviews and visits to cafes, parks, malls and other public places this summer, The Star-Ledger found a culture of dating in Tehran and Shiraz that would have been unheard of just a handful of years ago.

In Tehran, a more modern city of 12 million, couples on dates locked eyes during conversations, sat in restaurant booths so their legs touched and held hands without hurriedly letting go.

In Shiraz, a city of nearly 4 million, couples seemed more reserved, mostly, they said, because they feared running into someone they know. They grazed fingers under the table and quickly met each others' longing looks.

In previous articles, Qarooni has looked at Iranian vacation spots, funeral rituals, attitudes toward America, and the yearning of many Iranian women for smaller noses.  There's more here, here and here.

This is all very enlightening.  But the Star-Ledger is clearly interested in more than  informing its readers about a colorful foreign culture.  In all likelihood, the U.S. will launch a major military action against Iran in the next 12 to 24 months.     In the process, many Iranians will die.  It will much harder to gain the approval of the American people for such an attack if they understand that Iranians are people, too.  People who have love affairs, struggle to make ends meet, worry about their looks, etc.

The Star-Ledger and the rest of the MSM are in a race against time to put a human face on Iran before the U.S. mounts an attack.  The tragedy is that there are indeed many fine people in Iran.  They're not spending their days plotting jihad or building nukes.  In fact, many of them are pro-American, especially the young people.  But perhaps now is not the best time for the media to try building love and understanding between Americans and Iranians. 

In World War II, the U.S. government and most domestic media demonized the enemy, especially the Japanese.  Many of these depictions were downright racist and would never pass muster under current standards of political correctness.  But it's hard to argue with results.  Americans were furious with the Germans and Japanese, and they stayed mad long enough to beat the tar out of them and win. 

Those days are long gone, replaced by multicultural nostrums and non-stop efforts to soothe our passions.  It's hard to see how we'll win the coming conflict with this approach.

Charles Krauthammer makes all of this abundantly clear in his latest Washington Post op-ed, The Tehran Calculus. As Krauthammer notes, the costs of attacking Iran would be dire. At a minimum, a major attack would send oil prices through the roof and trigger a massive worldwide recession. Iran would likely activate legions of terrorists to destabilize Iraq and sow panic and fear in the West. And of course, there would be a huge upsurge in anti-Americanism as well as political turmoil in the United States.

These fears are serious and should not be discounted. But they look trivial compared to the costs of doing nothing. That path leads to a nuclear Iran and far greater chaos. As Krauthammer writes:

In the region, Persian Iran will immediately become the hegemonic power in the Arab Middle East. Today it is deterred from overt aggression against its neighbors by the threat of conventional retaliation. Against a nuclear Iran, such deterrence becomes far less credible. As its weak, nonnuclear Persian Gulf neighbors accommodate to it, jihadist Iran will gain control of the most strategic region on the globe.

Then there is the larger danger of permitting nuclear weapons to be acquired by religious fanatics seized with an eschatological belief in the imminent apocalypse and in their own divine duty to hasten the End of Days. The mullahs are infinitely more likely to use these weapons than anyone in the history of the nuclear age. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map.

Against millenarian fanaticism glorying in a cult of death, deterrence is a mere wish. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble?

August 22, of course, is a reference to the day on which Muslims commemorate the "night flight" of the Prophet Muhammad on a winged horse, first to Jerusalem and then to heaven and back. More ominously, it's also the date on which Iran's nutjob president, Mahmoud Ahmidinejad, has promised to deliver a final answer to U.S. demands that Iran curtail it's nuclear program. That worries Mr. Lewis:

There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran's present rulers. This worldview and expectation, vividly expressed in speeches, articles and even schoolbooks, clearly shape the perception and therefore the policies of Ahmadinejad and his disciples.

Even in the past it was clear that terrorists claiming to act in the name of Islam had no compunction in slaughtering large numbers of fellow Muslims. A notable example was the blowing up of the American embassies in East Africa in 1998, killing a few American diplomats and a much larger number of uninvolved local passersby, many of them Muslims. There were numerous other Muslim victims in the various terrorist attacks of the last 15 years.

The phrase "Allah will know his own" is usually used to explain such apparently callous unconcern; it means that while infidel, i.e., non-Muslim, victims will go to a well-deserved punishment in hell, Muslims will be sent straight to heaven. According to this view, the bombers are in fact doing their Muslim victims a favor by giving them a quick pass to heaven and its delights -- the rewards without the struggles of martyrdom. School textbooks tell young Iranians to be ready for a final global struggle against an evil enemy, named as the U.S., and to prepare themselves for the privileges of martyrdom.

As Lewis notes, people with this kind of mindset are not susceptible to deterrence. "At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway," notes Lewis. "What will matter will be the final destination of the dead -- hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement." [Emphasis added]

Lewis offers no good answers on how to deal with this threat, suggesting only that we somehow appeal to moderate Muslims to stand up to the apocalyptic whack jobs who are leading thjem into the abyss. Don't hold your breath waiting for that happen.

In light of this horrendous threat, the Bush Administration's foot dragging is maddening. The Administration is once again taking a tortured route through the United Nations, attempting to build an international consensus for imposing sanctions against Iran. But sanctions didn't work against Iraq and they won't work against Iran. On the other hand, they will buy Iran more time to build bombs.

President Bush has spoken many times about the need for preemptive attacks to prevent terrorist threats. The problem is that such attacks are politically impossible right now. Attacking Iran would provoke outrage among liberals and probably lead to the loss of Republican majorities in the House and Senate. But if that's what it takes to head off a nuclear war, Bush should attack anyway. That's what a true leader would do.

Exactly so. No country in the world would sit idly by while terrorists in a neighboring state rained thousands of missiles down upon it. But when Israel defends itself, there is inevitably an international uproar. State Department officials and other members of the striped pants set decry Israel's "disproportionate" response, while the BBC transmits antisemitic demagoguery around the world every hour on the hour.

No doubt a lot of this behavior is rooted in old fashioned amti-semitism. But there is also greed and fear at work; greed for the Arab world's oil and fear of inflaming Europe's expanding Muslim population. The result is a refusal to acknowledge that Israel has the same rights as any other sovereign state, particularly the right to exist and the right to defend itself.

The energy expended by the world in denying this particular regional crisis the traditional settlement is unique and perverse, except insofar as by ensuring that the "Palestinian question" is never resolved one is also ensuring that Israel's sovereignty is also never really settled: it, too, is conditional - and, to judge from recent columns in The Washington Post and The Times of London, it's increasingly seen that way in influential circles - the Jew is tolerated as a current leaseholder but, as in Anthony Hope's Ruritania, he can never truly own the land. Once again the Jews are rootless transients, though, in one of history's blacker jests, they're now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East.

Which would have given Aaron Lazarus a laugh. The Jews spent millennia on the Continent without ever being accepted as European. But no sooner are the Continent's Jewry all but extinct than suddenly every Jew left on the planet is a European.

Trying to satisfy people who want you dead and gone is a fool's errand. Israel should ignore their carping and just get on with it.

Lebanese security officials and the state news agency reported that Israeli air strikes on two villages in south Lebanon on Friday flattened two houses, and 57 people were reported buried in the rubble.

The strikes involved a house in the Lebanese town of Taibeh, about three miles from the Israeli border. The AP story claims that "17 people had taken refuge in the house." The second attack destroyed a building in Aita al-Shaab, another town near the border.

In typical AP fashion, the strikes are reported with no context. However, the clear implication is that these are more examples of Israeli "atrocities" committed against innocent civilians. Left unstated is why Israel chose to attack these two structures. Were they used to store Katyusha rockets and other weapons? Were they command and control centers for Hezbollah? Presumably Israel had a good reason for hitting these targets.

The claim that the people injured/killed in Taibeh had "taken refuge" comes from the Lebanese government, not exactly an impartial observer in the current conflict. Yet the AP apparently accepted the claim at face value. If the AP made any attempt to verify this claim, I'm not aware of it. For that matter, there is no confirmation of the number of people involved.

As many commentators have noted, Hezbollah is deliberately hiding behind innocent civilians in Lebanon. It's a win-win situation for Hezbollah: either Israel will defer attacking in order to protect innocent lives, or it will attack and provide Hezbollah with yet another opportunity to portray Israel as a bloodthirsty imperialist crusader aggressor. The fact that this is a war crime means nothing to Hezbollah.

Clearly there is no good way to sort out the terrorists from the locals, especially from 15,000 feet. The only solution for Israel is to give the Lebanese due notice and declare the territory between Israel and the Litani River a death zone. All non-Israeli personnel entering the zone would be subject to immediate attack. This would allow Israel to secure southern Lebanon without straining its limited military resources. Of course, most of the villages in southern Lebanon would need to be permanently evacuated, but that's the breaks. Displaced residents can lay the blame for their plight with Hezbollah.

One thing Israel should not do under any circumstances is agree to a "multi-national force" or, God forbid, the United Nations, to secure southern Lebanon. The U.N. had years to disarm Hezbollah following the Israeli pull-out in 2000 and failed miserably. And a "coalition of the willing," assuming that one can be cobbled together, would lack the staying power required. In the long term, Israel must impose its own solution on the ground or place its security in the hands of outsiders.

A fisherman is recovering after being impaled on the bill of a 14ft blue marlin that leapt over his boat during an international angling tournament off Bermuda.

The 800lb (360kg) fish hit Ian Card with such force that its 3ft spear went through his chest just below his collarbone and knocked him into the sea.

“It impaled him with its bill," said Card's father, who was fishing with his son. "In one motion, the fish flew across the cockpit and took him out of the boat. He landed about 15ft away. He was under water and had his arms wrapped round the fish as it was pushing him under." Card managed to extricate himself from the marlin and swam to the surface, with a fist-sized wound in his chest. He was rushed into surgery and survived, barely.

If this sounds familiar, perhaps it's because this is a case of life imitating art. In the atrociously bad movie Hook, Line and Sinker (1965), Jerry Lewis recounts his adventures as an international playboy and sports fisherman while doctors prep him for an operation. At the end of the movie the camera pulls back to show that Lewis has been impaled by a huge blue marlin. I haven't seen Hook, Line and Sinker in 40 years, but this story brought the memory back.

In case you were wondering, Card's fish got away.

These courageous thinkers reject the absurd notion that major clashes between civilizations need more than three years to be resolved in a satisfactory way. They have no interest in building freedom or democracy in the Middle East; they simply want to snuff the Bad Guys hard and fast and then go home, leaving the heathens to their pagan folly.

If we can't kill them all, what's the solution? There aren't that many options:

You can surrender in the Middle East, and let the terrorists have what they want. You can rely on "sanctions" or "containment," which will amount to surrender as soon as they fail. You can commit genocide against radical Islam wherever you find it. You can fight for democracy and freedom, in the slender hope that those seeds will grow in the infertile Middle Eastern soil. Or you can learn to love Saddam Hussein and his fellow perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Those are your only choices. Pick one.

What if the terrorists win, toppling governments across the Middle East and establishing a new Islamic Caliphate?  That’s the question that Egyptian political activist Tarek Heggy asks in today’s Ottawa Citizen.  In Heggy’s view, life for ordinary Muslims under such a regime would be nasty, brutish and short.

For starters, it would bring the complete isolation of the Muslim world from the non-Muslim world in all spheres -- scientific, economic, military and cultural. Indeed, it would create whole societies and huge numbers of people with little knowledge of science or of how its application in various fields can improve the quality of life on earth.

Of course, these outcomes would not matter to the radical Islamists since they are more concerned with what happens to people in the afterlife than their lot in this life, which is but an instant in the greater scheme of things, a passage to the hereafter.

Such a society would be incapable of providing its people with a Western standard of living, leading to further envy, resentment and hatred of the non-Muslim world.

I see Muslims staging raids on the world of the infidels and their targets retaliating in kind, their advanced weapons raining widespread devastation on the Muslim world and turning it into an empty wasteland where backwardness and chaos reign.

For the Muslims, who do not manufacture their own weapons but must buy them from their more advanced enemies, have no way of defending themselves against a modern military.

The issue that Heggy is dancing around is modernity, i.e., the rise of an integrated, globalized society built on the contributions of many distinct cultures.  The essence of such a society is change, since it is based on an openness to new ideas.  Modernity is anathema to devout Muslims, who believe that the perfect society is the one ordained by the Koran.  They are repelled by infidels, who they see as godless, immoral and corrupt. 

Under the current circumstances, perhaps the isolation of the Muslim world would be a good thing, or at least the option that will lead to the least misery and devastation in the years ahead.  After all, the Soviet Union was defeated through the pursuit of a “containment” policy over several decades.     

Of course, isolating the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims isn’t feasible in the short term, especially given the large numbers of Muslims that have settled in Europe.  And the West needs the Muslim world’s oil, virtually guaranteeing conflict for a long time to come.  But eventually the West will have to choose between walling off the Muslim world, destroying it or surrendering to it.

Over at The Corner, Stanley Kurtz notes that if nothing else, the Lebanon conflict has clarified the matter of the Iranian bomb.  If Iran goes nuclear, which seems all but certain at this point, other countries in the Middle East will feel compelled to go nuclear, too.  “That means a whole lot of nuclear bombs floating around the Middle East for the indefinite future,” writes Kurtz.  It’s a depressing prospect.

On the other hand, America has not suffered a major terrorist attack since 9-11.  Kurtz seizes on this fact as a cause for hope.

The other side knows that direct strikes on America unite the country and produce tough military action. For all our success at breaking up terrorist plots, I've got to think the terrorists have been intentionally holding back out of worry that strikes on American soil would lead to radical American action. Why haven't Hezbollah's sleeper cells hit us yet? Because they know the U.S. would then green light an Israeli attack of indefinite duration. Why hasn't al-Qaeda released to sort of cheap, easy suicide terror in the U.S.Israel? Because they fear it would provoke a U.S. takeover of their sanctuaries in Pakistan.

Well, maybe.  But a simpler explanation is that the terrorists are just not ready yet.  Recall that the planning for 9-11 began early in the Clinton Administration and took years to prepare.

If I were a terrorist, the key lesson of 9-11 is that you only get one shot at the U.S.  Anything short of a devastating strike will unite American society and prompt a massive retaliation.  My guess is that the next major attack will involve simultaneous nuclear strikes on several cities.  Probably no more than five cities, given the need to maintain operational security.

It will take a few more years for Iran, et al. to produce the necessary bombs and get everything in place.  That’s assuming, of course, that we allow Iran to continue on its current course unimpeded.  If we do nothing, historians will record these years as a brief interlude between world-wrenching cataclysms.