Office of the Independent Blogger

The main subject of this will be the Crisis with Iran, but other news can not be ignored: today, we learned that Jack Abramoff is going to jail for six years. Let me say that I don’t particularly feel bad for the clients he defrauded. The casino interests that he defrauded were seeking to defraud the nation, and so they were as crooked as he and likely belong in prison, too. I am glad that he’s going to prison, no doubt, but his crime isn’t defrauding his clients. It is the defrauding of the United States Federal Government, and by extension the American public.

Human beings need to learn to live with the Truth or with the Consequences of Lying. Jack Abramoff is proof that people who think they’re God get put in their place eventually, and that the lies you spin will hang you over time.

The UN Security Council has issued a demand for the Iranian Nuclear Program to be Suspended. There is nothing extraordinary to note in this, except that it is one more note in the Opera of Diplomacy going on between the Rest of the World and the Nation of Iran. I’m not fond of Krauthammer (he’s got the ethics of a prostitute and the mind of a Republican), but his latest article on the standoff is dead on.

We’re now at the dawn of an era in which an extreme and fanatical religious ideology, undeterred by the usual calculations of prudence and self-preservation, is wielding state power and will soon be wielding nuclear power. We have difficulty understanding the mentality of Iran’s newest rulers. Then again, we don’t understand the mentality of the men who flew into the World Trade Center or the mobs in Damascus and Tehran who chant “Death to America”–and Denmark(!)–and embrace the glory and romance of martyrdom.

This atavistic love of blood and death and, indeed, self-immolation in the name of God may not be new–medieval Europe had an abundance of millennial Christian sects–but until now it has never had the means to carry out its apocalyptic ends. That is why Iran’s arriving at the threshold of nuclear weaponry is such a signal historical moment. It is not just that its President says crazy things about the Holocaust. It is that he is a fervent believer in the imminent reappearance of the 12th Imam, Shi’ism’s version of the Messiah. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reported as saying in official meetings that the end of history is only two or three years away. He reportedly told an associate that on the podium of the General Assembly last September, he felt a halo around him and for “those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink … as if a hand was holding them there and it opened their eyes to receive” his message. He believes that the Islamic revolution’s raison d’être is to prepare the way for the messianic redemption, which in his eschatology is preceded by worldwide upheaval and chaos. How better to light the fuse for eternal bliss than with a nuclear flame?

For my money, the best attempt at a peaceful solution lies with a quarantine of Iran, a blockade which, in reality, amounts to an embargo on their gasoline and oil. It’s something that should be discussed at the White House early and often, and I’d be stunned if it wasn’t. The show of International Resolve would tell the Mullahs that the World is serious, and it would provide the necessary legitimacy for the World to argue that they did everything they could short of War to disarm the Iranians if, and once, the War with Iran begins.

Mark my words: the current path that Iran is leading the World on leads to a World War. If not a War that is global in its scope, with aerial battles in the Pacific and dead Americans in California, with destroyers in the Panama Canal and paratroopers over Iceland, then it will lead to War everywhere, as Muslims battle Israel violently and for a sense of finality; as the Russians battle the Separatists in their nation; as the Chinese and the Russians split with the United States, emboldening Korea’s aims over Japan.

Iran is a problem that can’t be kicked to the curb. And it has to be dealt with by the world, and soon. Angela Merkel recently compared the Iranian Situation to the one with Hitler, and the comparison was apt, if a tad odd coming from the German Chancellor. But Hitler didn’t have ovaries, Bubba, and he didn’t have Nuclear Weapons, either.

Iran does. And that makes this issue critical, and solving it paramount above all other problems.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).