We just can't stop being nice to Iran.

First, we break Iraq and hand it over to the Shiites, putting in a puppet who leans toward Iran and is aligned with the Shiite militias bankrolled by Iran. Then, as Peter Galbraith writes in The New York Review of Books, President Bush facilitates "the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia," with the ironic twist that "there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in Southern Iraq."

And on top of all that, we help build up the self-serving doofus Iranian president, a frontman with a Ph.D. in traffic management, into the sort of larger-than-life demon that the real powers in Iran -- the mullahs -- can love.

New York's hot blast of nastiness, jingoism and xenophobia toward its guest, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, only served to pump him up for his domestic audience. Iranians felt that their president had tied everyone in knots, including the "Zionist Jews," as Iranian state television said. The Times reports that Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, was on TV criticizing the rude treatment his president received: "It is shocking that a country that claims to be civilized treats him that way..."

The Daily News headline, "The Evil Has Landed," was one of the milder imprecations. Consider this reasoned analysis from Greg Gutfeld of Fox News: "So the foul-smelling fruitbat Ahmadinejad spoke at that crack house known as Columbia University today..."