What evil lurks within Ahmadinejad’s heart?

Experiencing frustration in his efforts to resolve myriad foreign policy issues, President Barack Obama blames some failures on President Bush. As to Obama’s failed policy to derail the Iranian express train seeking to load a nuclear arms cargo, he may want to consider blaming the 18th century philosopher Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau believed in the innate goodness of man. Putting it in today’s parlance, Rousseau would undoubtedly consider this goodness part of the human genome. Obama’s approach to foreign policy, especially in dealing with those countries labeled by his predecessor as the “Axis of Evil,” suggests he embraces this theory. Clearly, this has been his approach in dealing with the biggest threat to world stability today. Since taking office, Obama has sought to build a new relationship with Iran’s theocratic leadership to curb its efforts to develop nuclear weapons. To do so, he has apologized for America’s past wrongs, avoided criticizing Tehran when the will of the Iranian people was denied in a stolen presidential election and offered his hand in friendship, hoping to trigger the “goodness genome” he believes lies dormant within Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Yet, one year through a four-year term in office, Obama has nothing to show for his efforts. He is no closer to resolving the nuclear standoff, while Iran is closer to making the issue moot.

In dealing with Iran, Obama makes a fatal assumption—i.e., Ahmadinejad possesses a goodness genome. While Rousseau and Obama ideally, and naively, see the world populated by men with good intentions, reality—and history—tell us otherwise. Just as two of the 20th century’s most brutal leaders were wrongly perceived to possess such goodness, it is incredulous that today reasonable men could make a similar perception about a 21st century leader who has done everything possible to dispel any notion of goodness by his words and deeds.

Idealists once perceived Josef Stalin and Adolph Hitler to possess the genome. The perception led to both receiving nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. But history revealed these leaders’ character to possess DNA closer to Attila the Hun than to Rousseau’s goodness genome. Before their terror reigns ended, tens of millions of innocent lives were lost.

It is worrisome Obama has yet to understand Ahmadinejad not only lacks the genome but possesses the combined evil traits of both 20th-century tyrants.

Stalin’s terror reign was primarily directed against his own people—initiating purges that ultimately claimed twenty million lives. Meanwhile, Hitler’s reign primarily focused on non-Germans, claiming 6 million Jewish lives in the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad has incorporated aspects of both into his own terror campaign. Domestically, he targets his own people, robbing them of individual rights, including that to life. Externally, he targets the non-Muslim world, seeking either to destroy or enslave it under Islamic rule—a feat to be accomplished with the actual or threatened use of nuclear weapons—fearing not the consequences of U.S. nuclear retaliation. In fact, this religious fanatic would welcome retaliation as a vehicle by which he could gain entry to a rewarding afterlife and the expeditious return to Earth of the 12th Imam, whom, he believes, will then subject the world to Islamic rule.

As one whose family was either victimized or witnessed firsthand Stalin’s and Hitler’s brutality, the author is sensitive to brutal leaders running amok, unencumbered by a goodness genome. These family member experiences presage what is happening in Iran.