THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL LUNATIC THUG

The good news is we’re unlikely to be as obsessed with the war in Iraq in 2006 as we were in 2005. The bad news is we may soon have much more to worry about.

Mahmoud Amadinejad is the president of Iran, picked by the aging mullahs of the Guardian Council who hold the real power in the land. Since his election last August, Mr. Amadinejad has been replacing elderly clerics in senior government positions with colleagues from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Iranian version of the Nazi SS, which he once commanded.

Mr. Amadinejad is a thug. He was one of the leaders of the "student" group which seized the U.S. embassy during the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, holding 66 Americans hostage for 444 days.

Later, he served in the Qods (Jerusalem) Force of the IRGC, which is comparable to the SD, the intelligence arm of the Nazi SS. He is alleged to have masterminded assassinations of Iranian exiles in the Middle East and Europe.

Mahmoud Amadinejad is a religious extremist who may also be a lunatic. He is said to believe not only that the return of the "12th Imam," (which signals the end of the world) is imminent, but that it is the responsibility of true believers to help create the conditions (chaos) which would facilitate the 12th Imam’s return.

According to Shia eschatology, the 12th Imam is a child named Mehdi who disappeared down a well 1,300 years ago, but who will return to redeem the world.

Mr. Amadinejad is — according to "Alan Peters," the nom de plume of a former intelligence officer who specialized in Iran — a devotee of the Hojatieh philosophy, as extreme a form of Shia Islam as the Salafi philosophy that motivates Al Qaeda is of Sunni Islam.

"The Hojatieh firmly believe (the Mehdi) will return only when the world contains enough oppression, misery, tyranny and sorrow to warrant his coming," notes Peters. "To hasten and facilitate the return, they believe in spreading evil, tyranny and misery and argue that standing in the way of all these delays his coming and their redemption."

Amadinejad may soon be the world’s most powerful lunatic thug. The Israeli intelligence service Mossad and Mohamed Elbaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, think Iran may have an atomic bomb as soon as March. Iran already possesses ballistic missiles (the Shahab 3) which can strike Israel.

CIA analysts think it will be up to ten years before Iran has the bomb, an analysis which would be more comforting if CIA analysts hadn’t so been so consistently wrong in their assessments of Iran and Iraq in the past.

Amadinejad has called repeatedly for the destruction of Israel, and may soon have the means. The Iranians have test-fired the Shahab 3 from oceangoing freighters, so Iran also conceivably could strike at the "Great Satan" itself.

Those (like Elbaradei) who think Iran will get nuclear weapons, but don’t feel the need to do anything about it, assert Iran would only use its nukes for diplomatic leverage, as the Soviet Union did, or for blackmail, as North Korea does.

But what if Mahmoud Amadinejad means what he says?

Adolf Hitler spelled out what he intended to do in "Mein Kampf." The leaders of Britain and France didn’t take him seriously, because they wouldn’t do what he said he intended to do if they were in his position, and because taking Hitler at his word would have meant having to take dangerous, politically unpopular steps.

So the leaders of Europe convinced themselves Hitler wasn’t what his words and actions indicated he was. The result was a world war.

With Hitler safely defeated, the world’s leaders vowed: "Never again." But apparently that resolve applies more to threats past than to threats emerging.

"We must prepare ourselves to rule the world, and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the Expectation of the Return," Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a speech in Qom earlier this month.

"We have a strategy drawn up for the destruction of Anglo-Saxon civilization," said Hassan Abbasi, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s top foreign policy adviser.

But how much spine does the West have to take preventative, preemptive action?

The West failed to do so against Hitler in 1938, hoping for “Peace in our time.” Let’s hope it’s not like 1938 in 2006.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.