For Goodness' Sake, Don't Rile Them

Europe is about to rouse itself to ineffective pseudo-action:

EU powers began circulating a draft resolution on Wednesday for a February 2 meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog asking it to report Iran to the Security Council...

...but have no fear; Europe will make sure that even ineffective action is stymied:

...but Russia was seeking moves that stopped short of a formal referral.

The good news?

The EU draft resolution drew scorn from Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yep. That's the good news.

Wretchard at the Belmont Club has the bad news...:

H.G. Wells described how complacent men could be in the presence of unseen but growing danger. No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.With a few changes Wells' paragraph could describe the mixture of smug amusement with which the Western intellectual elite watched the growing number of Wahabist mosques, the photography of landmarks, the application for flying lessons and the attendance at courses of nuclear physics by students from older worlds. They laughed, for nothing could threaten the dominion of Western Man, supreme in his socialized state at the End of History. Even after September 11 the only question for many was how soon history would return to normal after a temporary inconvenience. Little did they imagine that the expansion of the European Union, the Kyoto Agreements and Reproductive Rights -- all the preoccupations of their unshakable world -- might be the least of humanity's concerns in the coming years.

...and, maybe, the good:

It was said of Admiral John Jellicoe that he was the only person capable of losing the First World War in an afternoon, because as commander of the British Grand Fleet, he could throw away the foundational power of Britain in a single naval disaster. It may equally be said that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alone can strip Iran of its invulnerability to military action in a single rash moment. In that sense he is not, as some pundits think, the worst possible leader Iran could have at the moment. On the contrary, this unstable, bellicose man is from another point of view the answer to all his enemy's prayers.

That, or Iran's version of Andropov; the hard-liner that makes the mullahs look over the edge of the abyss.

The big question, of course; do the mullahs think falling off the edge into the abyss is a bad thing, the way the Politburo did before removing Andropov and Chernenko and installing the conciliatory Gorbachev.

Is an Iranian Gorbachev possible, given Iran's leadership's millenarian sect of Islam?

Posted by Mitch at January 19, 2006 04:59 AM | TrackBack