David Solway writes (read the whole article at Front Page Magazine): 

Our political leaders, the majority of our public intellectuals and the mainstream media have not realized, or myopically refuse to realize, what is at stake as the historical drama in which we are implicated unfolds—a drama in which Iran and Israel are the central actors. 

Let us imagine a terrifying possibility. We know that Iran has vowed to unleash nuclear havoc upon Israel. Should Israel respond in kind, as it would have every right to do, the damage may not be confined to a localized area. Many people are callous enough to accept the nuclear probability of Tel Aviv and Tehran reduced to rubble and ash, so long as they can get on with their lives. What they do not realize is that they too are in the line of fire.

An atomic missile falling on Kharg Island, for example, Iran’s major oil depot in the Persian Gulf, would ignite a radioactive oil fire that could probably not be extinguished and the skies would gradually darken over us all. Such a conflagration would more likely than not have to burn itself out, when it might well be too late to recover from its effect on climate and agriculture. Israel would undoubtedly do its utmost to avoid striking such installations, but Iran remains one vast inflammable oil well. An errant nuclear-tipped missile, launched from either side, may have planetary consequences. Krakatoa would be as nothing in comparison. Saddam lighting up a number of oil wells in Kuwait would not even qualify as a harbinger of what would occur—we recall that it took several months for American engineers to control a relatively minor irritation in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.

We are now living what may be the most precarious moment in the recorded history of the world as we continue to play the dangerous game of Iranian roulette—the game in which not one but five of the six chambers are loaded…

In the current play of innocuous strategies vis à vis Iran, of abject appeasement and feeble sanction, juicy carrot and twig-like stick, this is not a fifth act we should placidly discount. Former American ambassador to the UN John Bolton, one of our most reliable analysts, has warned that “there are no incentives that will dissuade Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons” (Newsmax, January 28, 2009). And so far, no disincentives either…

Ahmadinejad has made clear his intention to prompt the advent of the Mahdi by initiating an act of apocalyptic violence. It’s not a bad plan from the Imamic perspective. Accelerate the Mahdi’s arrival by bringing about a nuclear cataclysm and reap the reward of either of two outcomes. Israel is destroyed and Iran survives since, as Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani has informed us, Iran can absorb “thirty or forty million martyrs” in its march toward a global Caliphate. Alternatively, Iran is also consumed and very possibly the world along with it, a global conquest to be savored from a position of vantage in Jannah, the Garden of Eternal Delights. Either way, victory.

Fear-mongering? Think again. Those who would argue that such a scenario makes no sense and is in fact counter-productive have simply not grasped the metality in question. A nuclear weapon is only a bigger suicide bomb and there are prospective “martyrs” aplenty…

The aim is to ensure that Iran stays afloat while it prepares to accomplish its mission, predicated on the calculated risk that neither Israel nor America will intervene in time to deflect its trajectory. It’s a gamble, but one the Iranians are confident they can win. (And they certainly have nothing to worry about from a flaccid and propitiatory Europe.)…

 We should do well to keep in mind that we are not treating with a cadre of lucid and sensible actors who can be trusted to be reasonable—as we understand reasonableness. They are labile, invidious and locked in a mental universe that is utterly foreign to our own…

The original statement delivered in Farsi at the “World without Zionism” conference held in Tehran on October 26, 2005 translates literally as: Israel “must be erased from the page of time,” a slogan draped across Shihab-3 missiles at military parades, which makes the intent rather obvious. “Wiped off the map” is the non-literal translation provided by the New York Times… 

Many of Iran’s enablers in Western intellectual and political circles, such as Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, Stephen Walt of “Israel Lobby” fame, the despicable Jimmy Carter and American Congressmen Denis Kucinich and Ron Paul, have tried to soft-pedal Ahmadinejad’s threat. The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Max Rodendeck speaks dismissively of Iran’s “nuclear gadgetry.” … The downward appraisal by the American National Intelligence Estimate of Iran’s nuclear program, which reduced the threat index and thereby mitigated the urgency of the situation, turns out to have been totally misguided. It was subsequently reversed by director Michael McConnell at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 5, 2008.

Ahmadinejad looks and acts like a small-time crook, but he will soon have his finger on a big-time button. Nor should we be deceived by his apparent buffoonery. He means what he says and he needs to be taken at his word…                                  

Jews now have their own nation and are no longer powerless to react or to exact vengeance. If Israel finds itself in the throes of annihilation in a second Holocaust, left to smoulder in the world’s guilty unconcern, no one can dictate to it what its response should be. And no one should consider himself exempt from the consequences.

It is time to rub the slumber from our eyes. Should Iran carry out its promise to destroy Israel, whether directly or by proxy, thus hastening the looming parousia of the long-awaited Mahdi, and Israel retaliate in nuclear reprisal, the region will be set ablaze. The fact that the world economy would crater far more severely than anything we are experiencing today is almost beside the point. Far worse, the effect on the global ecology might well be disastrous and possibly terminal, and we, too, like our foolish predecessors, will have learned too late that blindness and make-believe never work. The writing is not only on the wall; it is in the documents, the proclamations, the newspapers, the texts of speeches…

Our attention has been distracted by other volatile nuclear powers, such as Pakistan and North Korea. Pakistan in particular, if the inchmeal approach of the Taliban toward the capital is not halted, will need to be robustly confronted. But in an oil-drenched region primed to go up in flames, in which one nation is acquiring offensive nuclear ordnance which it vows to use and another is ready to respond defensively, the immediate world-threat is Iran. It must be dealt with in short order, whether militarily or economically, and its nuclear designs effectively negated.

For if we do not wake up, the day may dawn when we do not wake up.