Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s push to achieve nuclear weapons capability must be thwarted. In an appropriate response to the existential danger of unmonitored nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism posed most notably by Iran’s uranium-enrichment project, US President Barack Obama is currently hosting a two-day summit on nuclear security attended by leaders of 46 countries. This is the largest meeting of its kind hosted by an American president since the 1945 San Francisco Conference created the United Nations and helped establish the post-war world order.
In an extensive interview with The New York Times last week, the US president said that “the biggest threat that we now confront is probably not an attack from a nuclear weapons state, but from nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation.” Though the president did not say so, Iran is the most likely candidate to facilitate such nuclear terrorism if it ever gets an opportunity.
Ahmadinejad, socialized in the 1980s into the ethos of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, is continuing the legacy of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose global agenda aimed to destroy American hegemony in the Middle East and “wipe Israel off the map.” A unique aspect of this Shi’ite outlook is a dualistic division of the world into oppressors (the West) and oppressed (Third World countries), with radical Islam and the impoverished masses locked in an apocalyptic battle against the US and Israel, the Great Satan and its little brother.
Still more ominous, however, is the influence of Ahmadinejad’s mentor, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mezhab-Yazdi, who has instilled in Iran’s president the conviction that Shi’ites can, and must, hasten the coming of the mahdi, or messiah – the 12th and final Hidden Imam – by advancing “the clash of civilizations,” Armageddon and the end of days by, for instance, precipitating a nuclear war.
In his book A Lethal Obsession, scholar of anti-Semitism Robert Wistrich argues that “Western decision-makers have not fully internalized the jihadist and eschatological dimensions of Iranian policy – the full implications of its underlying ideology, aspirations, and values.” As a result, economic sanctions, no matter how “crippling,” won’t work. Rational cost-benefit decision-making processes are not in play.
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http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=173057