The Islamic Republic of Iran

It boggles the mind. A rogue, threatening, malignant theocracy exists which has earned a hard-won reputation for aligning itself with terrorist groups; in fact, goes out of its way to carefully give formation and purpose and inspiration to those groups, funds and arms them, and uses them for extra-territorial advantage in delivering deadly punishment to those it deems to be its enemies.

It is a regime that excels in punishing its own population. The elite within the regime are corrupt beyond imagination and exploit opportunities to personally enrich themselves, while the population suffers.

This regime enjoys intimate and rewarding connections to other rogue countries; one that is committing mass atrocities against its own people, consigning a hundred thousand to death, and instituting a policy of terrorizing a religious majority, of imprisoning men, women and children, some of them never to be heard of again, using torture and threats of death carried through to completion.

A government whose leader calls in a terrorist group to aid in its campaign of atrocities against its own. A government complicit with its troops mass rape of its own civilians. A government that unleashed a barrage of chemical weapons on a sleeping suburb of its own capital to teach rebellious citizens a lesson they forgot when they died.

These are the friends of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but there are others. There is a hermit kingdom accustomed to threatening dire terror on its neighbours and the powerful friends of its neighbours, imposing starvation and death upon its cowering persecuted population, and using its state funds zealously to create its very own fissionable material to explode its very own atomic bombs, astonishing the world by its ferocious intentions.

Common cause with North Korea is a natural for Iran.

Why should the international community be concerned when conscienceless, utterly ruthless and madly paranoid psychopaths lead countries to become towering threats by the design of their aspirations? Simple enough; to avoid the consequences of not paying attention. To discover, through inattention and disinterest that both countries have indeed succeeded to their wild imaginations, though well beyond the wildest imagination of international security agencies and governments.

When there were two super-powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, both of which had assembled an astonishing number of nuclear warheads, there was an understanding between them of mutually assured destruction. Neither the Americans nor the Russians were particularly invested in personal annihilation. For one or the other to use that mass-destruction arsenal that they were invested in, would automatically invite reciprocation from the other.

That rational fear ensured that, barring the most unforeseen of horrible misadventures, neither would compress that irreversible red-button of mass destruction. Now, however, the international community has adopted 'red lines' in the sands of evolving, ephemeral chance. Even so, it has not fully penetrated the minds of those who cannot conceive the lunatic possibility that there are those demented minds who would invite Armageddon.

In Iran's blighted vision of eternity, immortality and Paradise, the height of existence is attainable. But for them, and their version of Shia Islamist followers only. All others are consigned to everlasting lamentations and hellfire. Just as dedicated martyrs clinging to jihad as a test of their Islamist faith will destroy themselves in the process of destroying others, Iranian Ayatollahs are prepared to destroy the current, imperfect world to welcome in the ushering of their awaited salvation courtesy of the Hidden Imam.

Iran has made its choices; its Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his clique of the faithful are acting out their pride in their religion, in their country, in their vision of compelling power strategy, to restore Islamist Iran to its proper place in the world's panoply of the most super of super-powers. What can possibly outdistance a super-power like the United States, other than a power that Iran imagines itself to be which has behind it the divine support of God?

There are options to be explored. One of which could be the detonation of high altitude nuclear devices launched by ships carrying very technically advanced ballistic missiles launchers geared to very long-range trajectories. Even an over-flight high-altitude aircraft on a suicide mission could manage such a detonation. Which would unleash a devastating electromagnetic charge that would instantly eliminate all electrical power infrastructure within North America.

The cold, dark future that would result, with the surviving population left to cope with disease and starvation would present no further obstacle to the Republic's advance toward super-powerdom and ultimate sovereignty of all it imagines. Closer, within the Middle East, as an improvised, improvident strategy for that region, a casual nuclear bomb lobbed at Israel would inevitably and swiftly release a response, in the process diminishing the geography beyond restoration.

These are fanciful scenarios of the end-of-days category magnified to full horror, the stuff of science fiction gone completely whacky. Resembling, in actual fact, the larger agenda of the Islamic Republic of Iran. With its tentacles reaching everywhere around the world. Its Hezbollah operative-functionaries have infiltrated Europe and North America, quietly fund-raising, operating illegitimate criminal enterprises to fuel their own enterprise.

The imagination grows feverish with possibilities. Unlike most nightmares that disappear when dawn breaks the dark of the nighttime hours, this is a nightmare that seems destined to remain with us for quite some time.