State of the Infidels

I mean, State of the Union.

Yeah, I know. It was all about Social Security.

But did you hear the part where the President sent a little message to the Iranian people?

Iran is run by the mullahs who, basically, took the place over by stomping on civilized values and taking U.S. citizens hostage, and holding them hostage for days and weeks and months, while a United States President fussed and dithered and considered and presented a noble profile for view.

("Ah have lusted in mah heart." "Ah will never lie to yew." Energy crisis? We will all shiver togethah.)

The mullahs saw another American president respond to another atrocity by sending over a couple missles that didn't strike much of anything of value, and then move on. (Move-on. Yeah, that would be a good name for an organization or something.)

The Iranian so-called theocracy never was a legitimate government in the sense that it was historically established or widely accepted by its people. It is and has always been a rule by religious thugs who systematically choose and use over-the-top violence above all other strategems. (I once interviewed an Iranian nurse seeking asylum who said that she had been beaten by the religious thugs - because her socks were too thick.) The mullahs may be savagely ignorant but they know that they still stay in power because they keep a population that outnumbers them, too scared to do much about them. They terrorise their own people; they rule by terror.

Well, now the Iranian people have heard a president of the United States say that we are on their side against the mullahs. Should the mullahs be worried?

After all, they have similar previous United States rhetoric to consider. But they also have the history of this president to consider, too. He said he was going to shut down the Taliban in Afganistan. He did it in a matter of months. He did it with both with new weaponry, and with some of our guys riding around on horseback like warriors in the movies, and with organization. But mostly it took determination. Remember the U.S.S.R.? The Soviet broke its teeth in Afganistan. The Afgans, residing to the east of Iran, now have a government run by its people, not by its religious nuts. A democracy is in place on Iran's eastern borders, because a United States president did what he said he was going to do. And if that isn't sufficiently instructive, there is the matter of Iraq, on the western border of Iran. This president said that Iraq was next, and, despite all the predictions to the contrary, it was. And in the case of Iraq, Saddam had a modern army, rather than some raggedy-assed tribal hill fighters armed only with 20 year old weapons and fanatism. And Saddam had time - time provided by all the useless negotiations in the U.N. that smart people said were necessary - to prepare a main plan to stay in power in the capital, and a back-up plan to go underground, literally, while an insurgency armed with piles of hidden materials pounded away at United States's determination. The key element was the determination of the United States, and its leader. Most recently, we've had United States marines fighting face-to-face where necessary in Falujah. The determination is there and the capability is there.

So, hell yeah. The mullahs should be worried. The Iranians have seen a country to the right of the them, and a country to the left of them, go from oppression to democracy, each in a matter of a months, and this president and the United States made it happen. So the mullahs should most definitely be worried.

Are they worried enough? Probably not. They have a view of history, and they are determined, too. The dream is of the caliphate. The dream is of when shariah is the law everywhere, and apostates everywhere are killed with the blessings of the law, and adulteresses everywhere are tied in sacks and struck with fist-sized stones repeatedly for as long as it takes - and it takes way too long - until they are a dead, misshapen mass of bloody pain. The mullahs know that there have been crusades before and they call us crusaders, now. They have never been beaten; they've only been discouraged and required to lie low for a generation or two or three. The dream of the caliphate remains.

The dream is of when the people of the book have been subjugated to dhimmi status, paying taxes and causing no interruption to the Islamic peace that will finally come to pass when each and every person is terrified stupid of the arbitrary authority of a mullah. It is, for them, a powerful dream.

In addition to determination, the mullahs in Iran and everywhere, have resources. All through the lands where mullahs predominate, there are young men who have no prospect of satisfaction in their lives, except to die. They have nothing to do on the weekends, because they have no weekends. No movies, no art, no girlfriends, no women. No books to read, exept the one. No employment. Nothing, except to sit in dust and talk to other hopeless young men such as themselves, and to listen to the mullahs. And they know there's damn little chance of them ever improving their lot in life, given the social and economic circumstances of their parts of the world. These are the tools of the mullahs. These can be shaped and sent to die when necessary. These will never ask the question that should occur to them -- hey, when was the last time we saw a mullah go give his own life fo the furtherance of Islam?

So, even if we should see the mullahs dumped in Iran, and then Syria, it won't be over. This is a world-wide event. Even in the U.S. there are mosques where the faithful are taught to hate the infidels - us. There are such mosques in Britain and Europe, Indonesia, the Phillipines, hell, all over. So, this isn't going to be over soon.

I suspect the next few years may be even more dramatic than the last few have been, and the next few years will demonstrate that we are merely at the beginning of a long struggle of questionable outcome. And I say, maybe the crusades were abandoned too soon. And I say, the mullahs have declared themselves our sworn and everlasting enemy and mean to conquer us, and we have their own words and terrorist deeds as proof. And I say, the sooner we realize that we are in a battle for survival, the sooner we can get on with acting to assure we survive. And I say, as would that great American pundit, Al Bundy, "Let's rock."