By Frederick Kempe (Wall Street Journal-summarized by the
Daily Alert):
-The U.S. remains distracted by Iraq, and Iran is calculating that Washington neither has the stomach to strike it militarily nor the international backing for meaningful economic sanctions, says Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. He says President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad may also be calculating that conflict with the West can be used to excite nationalism at home that would reignite an Iranian revolution whose Islamic flames have waned.
-The most important single factor galvanizing the world's powers behind a tougher approach to Iran has been President Ahmadinejad, who was elected last year.
What's well-known is that he has called for Israel to be either wiped from the map or relocated to Alaska or Bavaria. More troubling to nuclear strategists is his religious pre-occupation with the coming of a Shiite Islamic messiah, which he referred to last September during a UN speech in New York to the befuddlement of delegates.
-He then described his role in a November speech in Tehran as usher "for the glorious reappearance of the Imam Mahdi, may Allah hasten his reappearance." According to Shiites, "the Mahdi" is the 12th imam and disappeared as a child in 941. They believe a final judgment and end of the world will follow after his seven-year reign.
-Those who doubt President Ahmadinejad's religious convictions can watch a widely distributed videotape of his meeting with one of Iran's religious leaders during which he speaks of how he found himself bathed in a green light throughout his UN address and that "for those 27 or 28 minutes all of the leaders of the world did not blink."
-What concerns Mr. Clawson more is the Iranian capability to disrupt shipping in the Straits of Hormuz or sponsor a horrendous terrorist attack by al-Qaeda, which is believed to have links with Tehran. Iran has a history of backing terrorist attacks when it can preserve plausible deniability - such as the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.
