This is the headline article in Zola's recent letter which can be found online at http://www.levitt.com/newsletters/2006-04.pdf
 
The world is now in real trouble. This
writer clearly reveals why. – Zola
 
It’s Later Than We Think By Arnaud de Borchgrave, www.washingtontimes.com
The man in charge of hoodwinking the Western powers about Iran’s now
18-year-old secret nuclear program believes the apocalypse will happen
in his own lifetime. He’ll be 50 in October.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Shiite creed has convinced him lesser
mortals can not only influence, but hasten the awaited return of the 12th
Imam, known as the Mahdi. Iran’s dominant “Twelver” sect holds this
will be Muhammad ibn Hasan, the righteous descendant of the Prophet
Muhammad. He is said to have gone into “occlusion” in the 9th century,
at age 5. His return will be preceded by cosmic chaos, war, bloodshed, and
pestilence. After this cataclysmic confrontation between the forces of good
and evil, the Mahdi will lead the world to an era of universal peace.
“The ultimate promise of all divine religions,” says Ahmadinejad,
“will be fulfilled with the emergence of a perfect human being [the 12th Imam], who
is heir to all prophets. He will lead the world to justice and absolute peace. Oh mighty
Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last
repository, the promised one.” He reckons the return of the Imam, AWOL
for 11 centuries, is only two years away.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is close to the messianic Hojjatieh Society, which is
governed by the conviction that the 12th Imam’s return will be hastened by
“the creation of chaos on Earth.” He has fired Iran’s most experienced
diplomats and scores of other officials, presumably those
who don’t share his belief in apocalyptic conflagration.
The Iranian leader’s finger on a nuclear trigger would be
disquieting under any circumstances. Positively alarming
would be a nuclear weapon in the hands of a man who
badgers Israel, the U.S. and the European Union in belief
a pre-emptive aerial attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities will
hasten the return of the missing Mahdi. Such an attack
presumably would trigger anti-Western mayhem throughout
the Middle East.

When he became Iran’s sixth president since the 1979
revolution last summer, Mr. Ahmadinejad decided to
donate $20 million to the Jamkaran mosque, a popular
pilgrimage site where the faithful can drop their missives
to the “Hidden Imam” in a holy well. Tehran’s workingclass
faithful are convinced the new president and his
Cabinet signed a “compact” pledging themselves to
precipitate the return of the Mahdi — and dropped it
down Jamkaran’s well with the Mahdi’s zip code.

In Mr. Ahmadinejad’s eyes Iran is strong, with oil inching
up to $70 a barrel and America, dependent on foreign oil, is
weak. He has said publicly that America and Europe have
far more to lose than Iran if the U.N. Security Council
votes for tough economic sanctions. He also figures if
Israeli and/or U.S. warplanes strike Iran, all he has to do
is give the U.S. a hard time in Iraq as American forces
prepare to withdraw. Moving two or three Iranian divisions
into Iraq and activating Shiite suicide bombers
and hit squads throughout the region would not be too
hard for a country that fought an 8-year war against
Iraq (1980-88) and had no compunction about giving
thousands of youngsters a key to paradise and 72
virgins before sending them across Iraqi minefields.

A top Ahmadinejad officer, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Kossari, who heads the
political watchdog, or Security Bureau, of Iran’s armed forces, recently taunted
the U.S. when he bragged “we have identified all the weak points of our
enemies” and have sufficient cannon fodder — i.e., suicide operation volunteers
— “ready to strike at these sensitive locations.” Iranian television recently
broadcast an animated film for Iranian children glorifying suicide bombers.
So far, Supreme Leader and Chief of State Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who sits
in the holy city of Qom, has not expostulated.

Mr. Ahmadinejad appears to have his religious backside well covered.
His ideological mentor and spiritual guide is Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, who
heads the ultraconservative acolytes who believe the 12th Imam’s return is “imminent.”
The son of a blacksmith, Mr. Ahmadinejad earned an engineering Ph.D. and was a member of Iran’s notorious
Revolutionary Guards at a time when dissidents and “counterrevolutionaries” were executed by the thousands.
A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, first showed Iran how to build a nuclear weapon 18 years
ago. He opened his nuclear black market to Iranian engineers and scientists.

The Bush administration is anxious to clear the decks in
a democratic Iraq before facing the Islamist counterpart
of the “Rapture” in the Left Behind series of books on
the end of times by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
President Bush says all options are on the table. But the
military option is probably the one the “twelvers” would look
forward to. Some Washington think tank strategists argue
that if Iran’s “Dr. Strangelove” attacked Israel with a nuclear
weapon, five Iranian cities would be vaporized the next day.
It might behoove the United States to sit down with “axis
of evil” Iran to find out if the MAD (Mutually Assured
Destruction) doctrine that kept the Soviet Union and
the U.S. at peace for a half-century could still be made
to work.

In any event, one would have to be irredeemably myopic
not to see that Iran has an active nuclear weapons program.
The only question is how far this secret program
is from delivering a usable weapon and fitting it in the
nose cone of a Shahab-3 missile with the range to reach
Israel. The Israeli Air Force will be “overhead” in Iran
long before.
 
 

Mark Rouleau
rouleau-law@insightbb.com