The West should form a new organization for democratic countries only
The bipartisan team of U.S. elder politicians, public figures and a retired Supreme Court justice, led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, scraped the barrel of discarded, discredited and dysfunctional ideas and brought them together in their much-publicized Iraq Study Group Report.
This report was written on the premise that the Iraq policy of the Bush administration had run its course, and left alone could no longer reverse the “grave and deteriorating” situation there.
The substantive part of the report, less the appendices, is 96 pages in length divided into two parts: Assessment and a New Approach.
In New Approach the bipartisan ISG members offer a bundle of 79 recommendations under the heading of New Diplomatic Offensive.
The members believed that problems of insurgency, sectarian conflicts and spiralling violence in Iraq might only be resolved through a wider regional cooperation of Iraq’s neighbours—in particular engaging Syria and Iran in diplomatic talks.
How serious is the likelihood of such a proposition meaning anything positive except bending to the conceit of clerical authorities in Iran?
The ISG recommendation on engaging Iran is instructive of the essential hollowness of its report and of the need to rethink the policy of general appeasement of regimes that have made a mockery of the UN.
Even before the American public had time to absorb whatever little merit, if any, is in the report, the Iranian regime once again made plain its intentions in the region.
The two-day conference this past week called Review of the Holocaust that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran organized—inviting a gathering of Holocaust deniers and foul-minded anti-Semites such as former Klansman David Duke—made clear to the world the intentions of Iran in the Middle East.
This intention to precipitate the full destruction of Israel has been repeatedly announced going back to the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini.
In other words, clerical Iran is today a self-declared adherent of Hitler’s Third Reich goal of eliminating Jews as a state policy.
The world, and especially Western democracies, has responded to such chilling threats—even as Iran is bent upon acquiring nuclear capability to build for itself the new weapons of Holocaust—by offering ritual toothless condemnations.
The time is long past for pathetic appeasement of a vile regime. What is needed is an escalated offensive to bury this regime and let Iran once again become a truly free and respectable nation.
A resolute Canada might lead this offensive. Ottawa should begin a serious and determined consultation with Canada’s democratic allies to move a motion for expelling Iran from the United Nations.
The UN, if anyone cares to remember, was built in great measure on the ashes of the Holocaust.
Some six decades later, a UN member is defiantly engaged in vilifying the very purpose the organization was built to prevent from ever happening again.
There is no reason to believe, given the present UN composition, that such a motion as once was moved to deny South Africa’s credential—in effect expelling the white minority regime from the organization—will receive a majority vote in the General Assembly.
But such a predictable outcome should make it amply clear to self-respecting democracies that they can no longer sit in the same organization with the present regime representing Iran.
The democracies should walk out of the UN, rebuild with renewed hope and experience while forcing those seeking membership to meet a litmus test of democracy.
The UN should be instructed to vacate New York and, without any remorse, be left to choke in its own ignominy.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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