Hillary's Cares

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY 

Nuclear Proliferation: Hillary Clinton's campaign last year called her "tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world." The secretary of state is now failing a life-and-death test on Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The "3 a.m. phone call in the White House" was supposed to bring Democratic primary voters to their senses. Hillary's infamous TV spot, showing children safely and soundly asleep while "something's happening in the world," was meant to shock Americans out of their "fairy tale" dalliance with smooth-tongued ex-community activist Barack Obama.

Only the former first lady, who "already knows the world's leaders, knows the military," could navigate the rapids of foreign policy, not this neophyte from Chicago's South Side.

After the bitterness between the two had flowed under the bridge, the new president made the grand Lincolnian gesture of appointing Hillary secretary of state; the 16th president had done the same for his own presidential rival, William Seward.

Even Hillary critics expected a foreign policy run by her to add toughness to an Obama administration entranced by the miraculous powers of top-level negotiation with America's enemies.

But such hopes are being dashed.

The pre-eminent threat in the world today is the Islamofascist mullahcracy in Tehran. On a direct path toward atomic weapons, its rulers share the fanatical mind-set of the 9/11 al-Qaida hijackers. Yet the secretary of state's most recent remarks suggest an accommodationist stance.

Speaking to Thai television, Secretary Clinton said: "If the U.S. extends a defense umbrella over the region, if we do even more to support the military capacity of those in the Gulf, it's unlikely that Iran will be any stronger or safer because they won't be able to intimidate and dominate as they apparently believe they can once they have a nuclear weapon."

That statement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what animates Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, and its dubiously re-elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the 30-year-old Islamist revolution in Iran, once said: "I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."

The fanatic jihadists do not want to be "stronger or safer." Nor do they wish to "intimidate and dominate," not in the conventional geopolitical sense at least.

Rather, they wish the destruction of the perceived enemies of Islam, like Israel, the U.S. and Britain. Isn't it clear from his own words that if the Ayatollah Khomeini had had an A-bomb he would have "let this land go up in smoke" in a nuclear counterattack, if that were the price Iran had to pay to incinerate Tel Aviv or London?

Khomeini successor Khamenei has said, "Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon," referring to Israel. "We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region."

Ahmadinejad has said the Jewish state "must be wiped off the map," and sponsored a 2006 Tehran conference questioning the Nazi genocide of the Jews, one that featured former Klan grand wizard David Duke.

No "U.S. umbrella" can shield against such hate, because the haters are clearly willing to accept mass suicide to achieve their genocidal aims.

Tolerating a nuclear-armed Iran is a policy that will find Hillary on the phone with the president at 3 a.m. some horrible day, wondering how to respond to an atomic 9/11.