For the want of a bullet, the world was lost ...

As I prepare my Sukkah here in Jerusalem, the news networks are reporting on A-jad's hugely provocative appearance in the US and his invitation to speak to the students of Columbia University.

What he had to say was not of importance. The excuses given by the faculty for giving this man a platform are of even less importance.

What is of crucial interest is what history will record about this week's visit.

If there is an historian or journalist still alive after A-jad has tried out his nuclear toys, and should they find a scorched laptop with enough battery life left to tap out a few lines, they will most likely refer back to this particular week in the history of mankind.

And with their stiffening fingers, they will type out a sentence that contains a long list of "if onlys".

• If only we took him at his word about wiping a nation off the map.


• If only we had not let him go nuclear.


• If only we had realised that the cold war safeguard of 'mutually assured destruction' only worked between rational minds.


• If only we had understood that A-jad considered his own people totally expendable martyrs in the Jihad's ultimate - global and nuclear - suicide bombing .


• If only we had registered his maniacal belief that this death and destruction would usher in the era of the hidden imam; for whom he had built a grand roadway into Teheran as one of the first acts as president.

And finally .... if only we had not let him out of New York alive!

Many have speculated how many tens of millions of lives could have been saved if Hitler had been assassinated at any number of opportunities that presented themselves. Had Hitler won the war, such of us that survived might now be speaking German.

After A-jad's war, people may not be speaking at all.

Or breathing.