A frightening, and unfortunately plausible (given the inevitable insouciance of Europe, and much of the American electorate itself), future history:

The ideological cocktail that produced ‘Islamism’ was as potent as either of the extreme ideologies the West had produced in the previous century, communism and fascism. Islamism was anti-Western, anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic. A seminal moment was the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s intemperate attack on Israel in December 2005, when he called the Holocaust a ‘myth’. The state of Israel was a ‘disgraceful blot’, he had previously declared, to be wiped ‘off the map’.

Prior to 2007, the Islamists had seen no alternative but to wage war against their enemies by means of terrorism. From the Gaza to Manhattan, the hero of 2001 was the suicide bomber. Yet Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, craved a more serious weapon than strapped-on explosives. His decision to accelerate Iran’s nuclear weapons programme was intended to give Iran the kind of power North Korea already wielded in East Asia: the power to defy the United States; the power to obliterate America’s closest regional ally.

No, nothing like Munich at all.

As Dennis Miller once quipped (though it wasn’t really funny), “To believe the left, Bush is Hitler, Cheney is Hitler, Ashcroft is Hitler, Rumsfeld is Hitler, but the guy with the mustache who gasses people and hates Jews and wants to conquer the world isn’t Hitler. Go figure.”