There's no other way to describe a rally where 2-4,000 people show up when in past years, the numbers exceeded 25,000.

The Rally Against Iran was a failure because liberal Democrats and the Obama campaign know that the issue of Iran is a winner for Republicans and that Obama has shown himself a weak sister when it comes to dealing with Ahmadinejad.

Americans by large margins believe we should meet with Iranian leaders - but only after careful groundwork has been laid. The current administration has said they will hold high level talks with Iran just  as soon as they stop enriching uranium - exactly what the United Nations has made a condition as far as lifting the sanctions against the Iranian regime.

Why this is seen as a stubborn refusal to meet with the Iranians has much more to do with the Democrats trying to score political points than it does any rational, reasoned foreign policy position. Nations make conditions for meetings all the time - all over the world. But in Obama's universe, he is so arrogantly convinced in his own messianic abilities that he believes a meeting with Ahmadinejad will convince that brute of his sweet intentions and that he can talk the Iranians out of their mad drive for a nuclear bomb.

The latest IAEA report on the Iranian enrichment program is deceptive. Apparently, the Iranians have upped their cooperation to include agreeing to a timeline to answer "all outstanding questions" on their program. What the report doesn't say - what it can't say - is Iranian intent. The cold hard fact is that even though Iran is only enriching uranium to a level suitable for use in a nuclear reactor (about 5%), it would be a simple matter to take the already enriched uranium and goose it up to the 85-90% enrichment level to construct a bomb.

This is what the US fears. This is what the Israelis cannot afford to live with. This is why Ahmadinejad must be stopped. He has played a brilliant PR game on his nuke program for years, following international rules almost to a "T" while hiding other elements of his program that may include bomb design and warhead construction. This has been the goal of the IAEA - to get Iran to come completely clean on all facets of their nuke program.

The fact that just as sanctions are beginning to have a small effect, ElBaradei is calling for an end to them along with a halt in enrichment activities by Iran shows the IAEA is not very serious about ferreting out any Iranian bomb program. In fact, the IAEA seems not to want to find out, allowing the Iranians great leeway in how to interpret their responsibilities under the IAEA charter. They have dragged their heels for years on getting to the bottom of the Iranian program while Ahmadinejad has played them like a master violinist.

This then is the background where the rally took place in New York yesterday. And the fact that the Democrats decided to play politics with such a vital issue should tell us all we need to know about how serious they are in protecting the country. The rally could have gone forward with speakers from both parties, putting up a united front, telling Mr. Ahmadinejad that he cannot have a nuclear weapon and that his regime is a blight on humanity's soul.

Michael Ledeen, in a letter to Ahmadinejad published in NRO, details the Iranian president's love of death and what they forced children to do during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's:

But your praise of Iranian fighters isn't limited to men shot down on the battlefield in that bloody war;  you celebrate cases of what you call - and extol - "martyrdom." I call it the deliberate, criminal slaughter of many tens of thousands of young children. Some of those kids were only 12 years old. They were sent across the battlefields into Iraqi territory, as human mine-detectors. They walked across the minefields, and got blown up. The Iraqi soldiers were so horrified that they shouted at the children to stop, to go back. But they didn't; you'd indoctrinated or hypnotized them, and you wanted them to die. Indeed, you were so certain they would be killed, that these little children were provided with plastic keys that were said to open the gates to paradise.

That's not martyrdom; that's mass murder of your own people. You indoctrinated those kids and sent them to their doom. And it didn't stop with the war. Afterwards, you sent other children to walk across areas you suspected were mined, and many of them were sacrificed in the same way.

This barbarous campaign, of which you are so proud, and which you acclaim as a work of art, produced some particularly gruesome technical problems: according to one of your leading newspapers, many of those children were vaporized by the land mines, while others were blown to pieces, their body parts scattered over the earth. Your religious leaders insisted that everything be done to keep the bodies intact, and so at a certain point the children were sent to the mine fields wrapped tightly in blankets. Instead of charging bravely to eternity, they rolled across the ground. That way, their cadavers were more likely to hold together, and their families could be given the remains, wrapped in a bloody blanket, for burial.

Sending fighters into battles in which their leaders know many, or even most of them, are going to die is hardly new. The Russians did it in the First World War, for example, when the second ranks were not armed, but were told that there would be plenty of weapons available; they could just pry them from the hands of their dead comrades. But your massacre of the innocents is something uniquely dreadful.