Churchill on How to Deal with Iran and Syria

In the GLORIA Blog 17 March 2009, Barry Rubin has picked up some good advice on how to deal with Iran and Syria today. Paraphrasing from Churchill's speech on 5th October 1938, in the House of Commons, on the Munich Agreement, in which Czeckoslovakia was sacrificed to the Nazi regime:

"[President Obama] desires to see cordial relations between [the USA] and [Iran]. There is no difficulty at all in having cordial relations between the peoples. Our hearts go out to them. But they have no power. But never will you have friendship with the present [Iranian] Government. You must have diplomatic and correct relations, but there can never be friendship between the [US] democracy and the [Islamic Revolutionary] power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses, as we have seen, with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force. That power cannot ever be the trusted friend of the [US] democracy."