Wednesday, July 26, 2006

IRAN: I wish Mark Steyn wasn't so brilliant.

Why would I say such a thing? Because if he weren't so brilliant he wouldn't write such powerful yet long essays as this one ... and I wouldn't have this headache. His combination of wit and incisiveness is awesome. What a communicator!

Steyn says the West has had three opportunities to face down Iran, and the West has blinked each time. He says, the fourth will be ...


I realize I'm way behind the pack on this article, but I only just today received and email from Brian Anderson (Sr. Ed. at The City Journal) alerting me to the piece by Steyn ... who, writing in the Journal's Spring 2006 online edition, is absolutely eloquent and penitrating (as always) in his analysis of the West's 27 year-old problem - Iran!
Most Westerners read the map of the world like a Broadway marquee: north is top of the bill - America, Britain, Europe, Russia - and the rest dribbles away into a mass of supporting players punctuated by occasional Star Guests: India, China, Australia. Everyone else gets rounded up into groups: "Africa," "Asia," "Latin America."

But if you're one of the down-page crowd, the center of the world is wherever you happen to be. Take Iran: it doesn't fit into any of the groups. Indeed, it's a buffer zone between most of the important ones ...

[...]

If you divide the world into geographical regions, then, Iran's neither here nor there. But if you divide it ideologically, the mullahs are ideally positioned at the center of the various provinces of Islam — the Arabs, the Turks, the Stans, and the south Asians. Who better to unite the Muslim world under one inspiring, courageous leadership? If there's going to be an Islamic superpower, Tehran would seem to be the obvious candidate.

That moment of ascendancy is now upon us. Or as the Daily Telegraph in London reported: "Iran's hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies."
Reading Steyn's evaluation of Iran's potential and the West's mistakes leaves me with a cold chill coursing up what is not normally an easily tweeked spine. This column scares the H__l out of me. And it should you. Young people may not remember the history of the years he writes about but I do, and his take on events between about 1970 and the present are spot on.
As Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, "It is in our revolution's interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world." Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: "We won't stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law."
Steyn goes on to explain Iran's role in Islam's aim for world domination; he uses Europe as anecdotal evidence of the potential of these power mad religious nuts with nukes.
If [your nation has] also "recently acquired' a significant Muslim population [as much of the EU has] and you're not sure how to "adjust" to it [as they clearly aren't], well, here's the difference: back when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated to the host country. As Kofi and Co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate to the immigrants: if Islamic law forbids representations of the Prophet, then so must Danish law, and French law, and American law.
My question is this: who has been running the US for the past three decades that this kind of thing could happen.

Truly it makes one sick to the stomach to think of the massive intelligence failures, the legislative failures, and the executive failures required to blow this one. Makes me want to go out and smash the first politician I run into! Neither party can say, "Not me!" They've both got blood on their hands.

Read Steyn's full article ... read it and reread it!



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