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The cold war with Iran is a quarter century old and moving toward a crisis. A crisis, says the wag, is when there are no good options, and that describes the threat of the violent, ruthless, hallucinatory Iran under the priest craft of the mullahs and the non-rational talk of Ahmadinejad and his IRGC cabal. No good options. The crash of nation states ahead is as inevitable as fission. Meanwhile the EU shivers and feigns. The United States State Department is a pitiable schoolmarm. The United Nations is a fiction dreamed up by Cervantes.

What is to be done? Prepare for the dark ages. In the immediate future I can turn my irony at those among us who apologize for Tehran by doubting the threat. The blogometer at Hotline listed three self-enamored Democrat voices yesterday, Atrios, Lean Left and Matt Yglesias, who each contribute ignorant partisanship to the debate. Lean Left regards Iran as organized crime, not as a nuclear fuelled terror state with a stated desire to eliminate the State of Israel. Atrios hears "Iran Talk" as propaganda to advance an unstated domestic agenda by the Bush team or some imagined controlling authority. And Yglesias points to the first world war as a warning that preemption is futile.

The summary of these positions is that Iran is not a profoundly potent and mass-murdering enemy of the United States of America and its allies. The apologizing left now assumes the same blind role evidenced by the out of power Republican minority in the 1930s, who regarded FDR's looming confrontation with Germany and Japan as a diversion from squabbling about deflation. As if Iran policy is electioneering for '06 or '08, as if Iran is a Republican dirty trick.

How far will the smarty-pants leftosphere go down the path of appeasement to the Iran monster, and how many of the rightosphere will follow? History offers examples that the day the argument ends is the day none of us will much care about who is right. The EMP will mark the end of the digital age and the start of the dark age.

topics:
Iran, Israel, United Nations, NATO