"The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The
outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As
the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map."

So rants Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Given his apocalyptic rhetoric, we can understand why President Ahmadinejad
might want an arsenal of nuclear missiles. He'd be able to shake down a
constant stream of rich European emissaries, threaten the Arab Gulf states
to lower oil production, neutralize the influence of the United States in
the region - and, of course, destroy Israel.

In all his crazed pronouncements, Ahmadinejad reflects an end-of-days view:
History is coming to its grand finale under his aegis. Indeed, President
Ahmadinejad magically entrances even his foreign audiences into stupor. Of
his recent United Nations speech, he boasted: "I felt that all of a sudden
the atmosphere changed there. And for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not
blink."

So the name of the haloed Ahmadinejad will live for the ages - but only if
he alone takes out the crusader interloper in Jerusalem. The Shia may be the
dispossessed of the Muslim world, but, as the messianic figure the Great
Mahdi come to earth, Ahmadinejad can do something for the devout not seen
since Saladin expelled the infidels from Palestine.

But for now, barring divine intervention, Ahmadinejad's task poses two small
hurdles: getting the bomb and preparing the world for Israel's demise.

Oddly, the first obstacle may be easier. An impoverished Pakistan and North
Korea pulled it off. China and Russia will sell Tehran anything it cannot
get from rogue regimes. Ultimately, Moscow and Beijing will probably veto
any punitive action of the United Nations.

Impotent European diplomats will always defer to such an important global
figure, "ruling out" force to stop the Iranian nuclear industry as they
offer money and trade deals if Tehran will just act sanely.

The United States has a growing anti-war movement, and 180,000 of its troops
are busy birthing democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the unpredictable
George Bush has less than three years in office anyway.

But the second part of readying the world for the end of the Jewish state is
trickier.

True, the Middle East's secular gospel is anti-Semitism, broadcast hourly
from Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In these places, state-run media boom
out tired sermons about "pigs and apes." And, again, Russia and China don't
much care what happens to Israel, as long as its demise does not affect
business.

But the West is a different matter. There the history of anti-Semitism looms
large, framed by the Holocaust that nearly destroyed European Jewry.

So raising doubts about that genocide is now Ahmadinejad's aim just as much
as targeting downtown Tel Aviv. Holocaust denial is a tired game, but his
approach is different.

He has studied the recent Western postmodern mind, nursed on its holy
trinity of multiculturalism, moral equivalence and relativism. As a
third-world populist, Ahmadinejad expects that his own fascism will escape
scrutiny if he just recites enough the past sins of the West. He also
understands victimology. So he also knows that to destroy the Israelis, he -
not they - must become the victim, and the Europeans the ones who forced his
hand. To quote Ahmadinejad:

"So we ask you: If you indeed committed this great crime, why should the
oppressed people of Palestine be punished for it? If you committed a crime,
you yourselves should pay for it."

Ahmadinejad also grasps that there are millions of highly educated but
cynical Westerners who see nothing much exceptional about their own culture.
So if democratic America has nuclear weapons, why not theocratic Iran? "Your
arsenals are full to the brim, yet when it's the turn of a nation such as
mine to develop peaceful nuclear technology you object and resort to
threats."

Moreover, he knows how Western relativism works. So who is to say what are
"facts" or what is "true" - given the tendency of the powerful to
"construct" their own narratives and call the result "history." Was not the
Holocaust exaggerated, or perhaps even fabricated, as mere jails became
"death camps" through a trick of language to take over Palestinian land?

We laugh at all this as absurd. We should not.

Money, oil and threats have brought the Iranian theocrats to the very
threshold of a nuclear arsenal. Their uncanny diagnosis of Western malaise
has now convinced them that they can carefully fabricate a Holocaust-free
reality in which Muslims are the victims and Jews the aggressors deserving
of punishment. And thus Ahmadinejad's righteously aggrieved (and nuclear)
Iran can, after "hundreds of years of war," finally set things right in the
Middle East.

And then a world that wishes to continue to make money and drive cars in
peace won't much care how this divinely appointed holy man finally finishes
a bothersome "war of destiny."
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson012306.html