Brewing calamity

The Arab sabres being rattled in 1967 were of the conventional military variety – tanks, planes and artillery pieces. But an operational Iranian nuclear program will place weapons of infinitely greater lethality in the hands of an infinitely more fanatical regime.

Earlier this month Ahamadinajad issued the latest instalment in his ongoing campaign of annihilationist threats against Israel.

Speaking at a pro-Palestinian conference, the Iranian president declared: "Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm."

The Iranian leader's fire and brimstone rhetoric was bad enough on its own demerits. But his comments took on a half-life of their own when mushroom storm clouds of the type Ahmadinajad had in mind were sighted just over the horizon.

Last week Teheran proudly announced that its scientists successfully had jumped one of the most important hurdles on the path to a complete nuclear fuel cycle – uranium enrichment.

Iran's newly enriched uranium is not yet weapons grade, so this development may be only one small step for the mullahs' program to wipe Israel off the map.

But anything that constitutes progress towards Iranian nuclear self-sufficiency is a giant leap backward down the slippery slope towards military confrontation.

Professor Christopher Layne of Texas A&M University argues that the problem of a nuclear-armed Iran can be managed through Cold War diplomatic principles.

But deterrence only works when the people on both sides of the table share common values.

The Iranian "mullahcracy" and the West aren't even reading from the same playbook, much less being on the same page.

Ahmadinajad's apocalyptic rhetoric seems to embody a chiliastic yearning for the global catastrophe that is a necessary theological precursor to the return of the Mahdi – the Islamic messiah.

It is highly doubtful that the logic of high-stakes brinkmanship will apply to the jihadists who are at the helm of the Iranian state.