Letter for Letter, Mr. President

Most people seem to be bemused or insulted by the letter Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently sent to President George W. Bush.

But it certainly hit home among the Democrats and the media who seem to think that Ahmadinejad’s letter is an invitation to dialog.

Iranian expatriate Amir Taheri is the chap to provide background on a matter like this, and he doesn’t disappoint.

Ahmadinejad's move fits into a 14-century-long Muslim tradition, initiated by the Prophet Muhammad himself, of writing letters to "the rulers of the world."

The usual gambit is to “call on 'the infidel' to abandon their faith and submit to Islam.” And that is exactly what Ahmadinejad’s letter does.

In 1987 Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini offered to help the Soviets in their quagmire in Afghanistan if they would convert to Islam.

No thanks, responded Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the atheist Soviet Union.

But the call from Iran to convert to Islam provides the United States with a platform on which to articulate its own message in response, that the union of church and state in the Islamist movement is a disaster waiting to happen, a reactionary mass movement that will bring misery to the Middle East much as Communism brought misery to Russia and China, Nazism brought misery to Germany, and left-wing Latin American Bolivarism is in the middle of bringing misery to Venezuela and Bolivia.

So President Bush should respond to the Iranian leader’s letter, writes Taheri, and invite Ahmadinejad

to abandon Khomeinism and convert to liberal democracy. For, when all is said and done, the fight over Iran today is not about real or imagined nuclear weapons; it is about the kind of Iran with which the Middle East, indeed the whole world, can feel comfortable.

And it is about whether the Islamist dream of a new Caliphate is a vision or a delusion.