The Frightening Truth of Why Iran Wants a Bomb

Amir Taheri writes in the London Telegraph about Iran's strategy for achieving an atomic bomb. Note that in this essay we can see the mix of the insane with the cunning. On the one hand we have a leader who believes in the "12th Imam" who apparently is one thousand years old and is the real leader of the world, in defiance of all of those history books you ever read in school. And on the other hand we have the tactic of waiting for the West to loose its will to fight and thus winning by default. Not since Hitler have we seen a mad dictator so brazen in his threats against the West or so pompous in his over-confidence.

Contrary to Amadenejad's beliefs however, numbers alone are no longer an indication of superior military power. Nor have they been for at least five centuries. Cortez defeated the Aztecs with a small handful of men because of two reasons.

The first was that the Aztecs were still bound to the world of superstition; the world of demons and spirits. They had not yet reached the level at which a people learns the superiority of reason. The Spaniards, though backwards by modern standards, still were the representatives of a modern culture which understood the laws of cause and effect and which saw the world as we see it today; driven by natural laws which can be understood and applied to human purpose. The Iranians, for all their clutching at modern technology in the form of a bomb, do not really grasp the underlying foundation for the West's technological and economic superiority.

And of course the second is the very technology which makes the use of mere numbers an anachronism. A single American division of today is more deadly than all of the armies of the past put together. Technology and training in the western mode create a lethality which no other nation or culture has been able to match, as has been pointed out by historian Victor Davis Hanson. The real question is not whether we have the capacity to take out the mad Iranian dictators and their atomic bomb program. The real question is whether we have the willingness to do so in defense of our own culture and way of life.