Blithering On

The United States has nuclear weapons. So does Russia, China, France, The United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel. Nine nations have them. Why not Iran? To answer that question, it helps to understand what Iran is—and what it isn't. I was a college student when the Shah was deposed in 1979. At the time, many observers described the Iranian Revolution as a freedom-seeking domestic uprising against a dictatorship, and that interpretation still persists among some commentators today. But revolutions that seek liberty don't replace one autocrat with another. What emerged under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini wasn't a freedom movement. It was an effort to reshape the moral, political, and cultural order of Iranian society according to his Islamic revolutionary worldview. Khomeini believed Western political and cultural influence had corrupted the Muslim world and sought to replace it with a system governed by Islamic law and clerical authority. Khomeini taught that ...

The UN General Assembly passed a resolution on July 31, 2006 demanding that Iran stop enriching uranium or face sanctions. A month later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a statement before the UN General Assembly that, in view of the resolution, caught people's attention: "I emphatically declare that today's world, more than ever before, longs for just and righteous people with love for all humanity, and above all longs for the perfect righteous human being and the real savior who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace, and brotherhood on the planet." True to form, his statement was cryptic yet was intended to be meaningful once audience solved the riddle. So, I dug, figured out that he was referring to Imam Mohammed al-Mahdi, the "Twelfth Imam," and I wrote an article about it. Ahmadinejad was less mysterious when he addressed the General Assembly two years later: "Oh God, hasten the arrival of Imam al-Mahdi, ...