Steven den Beste has filed a response to a letter from Tehran.

Quoth the letter from Iran:

Though I often disagree with you, I enjoy your posts—they are thoughtful and provocative. But, sitting in my apartment in Tehran, I can’t help but oscillate between despondency and amusement these days. Do you not see what’s happening to you folks out in the yonder lands? Debating “final solution” are we? Mass murder in a cool, collected way? Killing over a billion, or is it perhaps just a few hundred million? Nuking a city or two, or is it only just the vicinity of a large metropolitan area? Issuing ultimatums to the world to take sides between mass murderers in ties or those with rags on their heads?

Respondeth den Beste:

If my nation was made up of the kind of monsters who "debate final solutions" and feel no qualms about "mass murder", you'd already be dead, because Tehran would have been converted to a glowing crater about 12 hours after the collapse of the WTC towers.
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It's not a question of my nation making a decision whether people will die. Islamic militants made that decision. America's only decision now is who will die, and where and when. If we stand by idly and passively, then it will be Americans who die, whenever and wherever the Islamic extremists choose to kill them, probably in huge numbers.

We don't consider that acceptable. That's surrender. That's not going to happen.

Instead, we're attempting to take control of events, in hopes that we can minimize the total number of deaths caused by this war. That's why we've embarked on the highly risky and unprecedented strategy we're following. If we were only concerned with minimizing American casualties and if we didn't care about anyone else, then every major Muslim city on the planet would have been vaporized by September 15, 2001, and the war would have ended in a week.

Well, yeah. The whole thing is worth a read.

The only part of it that I find myself disagreeing with are the notions that a) Radical Islamists started this war, and b) the war began on 11 September 2001.

I believe it started on 5 September 1972. I think that is the day when foresightful people would have concluded that the Arab War against Israel has gone global (or at least pan-European). Since then both sides have doubtlessly made innumerable mistakes and oftentimes behaved quite badly.

But does it really matter now?

Personally, who started the war and when it started are immaterial to me, except in that hypothesizing about same deflects attention away from the key and core current issues:

= who is at war now? and,

= how is the fighting best ended?

Stating who started it and when is like waking up during the middle of the night and arguing with your wife about who left the stove on. It's immaterial and counterproductive, because it saps energy from the important issues.