Iran, Korean Nukes

We would do well to take the Iranian president seriously, for he is proving himself a charismatic and clever leader. As he demonstrated recently at the United Nations, Ahmadinejad is adroit at putting aside Islamist themes when convenient and joining secular dictators like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe in their Marxist cant protesting American imperialism and economic hege mony. Like many totalitarian rulers, including Hitler and Stalin, he professes a love for mankind and world peace. In these ways, Ahmadinejad reflects the Iranian revolution's assimilation of traditional Islamic categories of faith to a Marxist lexicon of violent revolution. It is therefore more important than ever to realize that the Iranian revolution's brand of jihadism has close structural similarities to--and is historically descended from--strains of European revolutionary nihilism, including that of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Nazis, and extending to later third world offshoots like the Khmer Rouge...Why is Ahmadinejad Smiling, Walter P. Newell, The Weekly Standard, 10/16/2006

The warnings come and nobody listens. Careless headlines draw the eye, but what does a headline know?

It is logical, and now confirmed, that Iranian agents were present at the [North Korean atomic] test site, since they both ordered and paid for the test. It is logical, though not confirmed, that the agents were the same mix that was present at the July 4 missile exercise, either Pasdaran officers or Iranian Nuclear Energy Agency ops or Iranian intelligence ops, or all of the above. It is logical, though not confirmed, that the same device that was detonated is the miniaturized warhead that Iran needs to mount atop its rebuilt Taepodong-2 missile, a version of which Tehran calls the Shahab-3. It is logical, though not confirmed, that Iran wanted the American national security apparatus to see that the two critical elements in a mutually assured destruction scenario are now in place: a launch-on-warning missile offensive and a nuclear warhead for the outgoing strike...Persian Hands, by John Batchelor, The New York Sun, 10/10/2006

Newell directs the mind's attention to the ideological background for Ahmadinejad, who is no madman but a disciple of an apocalyptic, end of history ideology. Batchellor directs the mind's attention to the means that Ahmadinejad, with his mad North Korean ally, is already using toward that apocalypse.

Is anybody listening in Washington? Paris? Bonn? Rome? Madrid? Moscow?

It is evident that someone is in Beijing.

Luther