Nuclear Iran

History clearly is turning, and clearly not in our direction. It seems incredible, but really isn't, that in the 21st century religion would be the fulcrum on which it all tipped. The Enlightenment briefly flowered, in France and Scotland mostly, and Western intellectuals quickly fixated on that episode as if it expressed something intrinsic about human nature and the inevitable direction of history. That was delusional, a triumph of wishful thinking over reality. The true idea that people don't live by bread alone does not mean that they live instead by logic and science. The truth about people and cultural survival is turning out to be quite otherwise.

Mark Steyn's Facing Down Iran is very good and very sobering.

As clashes of civilizations go, this one’s between two extremes: on the one hand, a world that has everything it needs to wage decisive war—wealth, armies, industry, technology; on the other, a world that has nothing but pure ideology and plenty of believers... Four years into the “war on terror,” the Bush administration has begun promoting a new formulation: “the long war.” Not a reassuring name. In a short war, put your money on tanks and bombs—our strengths. In a long war, the better bet is will and manpower—their strengths, and our great weakness. If you add to the advantages of will and manpower a nuclear capability, the odds shift dramatically.