Back to Iran. Talk of a unified Qaeda/Iran/Hezbollah/Syria menace is nonsense as a casual scan of actual Sunni jihadist views will make clear. As Fred Kaplan notes, if Churchill and FDR had operated with the Bush mentality, "they might not have formed an alliance with the Soviet Union (out of a refusal to negotiate with evil Communists), and they might have therefore lost the war."
It's worse than that, though -- they might have proposed attacking the Soviet Union in the middle of the war because Bolshevism and Nazism were both species of Eurofascism.
-- Matthew Yglesias
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. keep blathering on about fascism and about not negotiating with terrorists. But they don't understand what fascists really are. They don't really understand the factions involved. And they try to use history to show they have a noble cause. But they are not really listening to the lessons of history. If we'd been so insistent on our supposed moral high ground, would we have worked closely with the Soviet Union during World War II? And if we hadn't, would we have a drastically different world now?