We are pretty much obsessed with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because we take him at his word. He has famously said that Israel should be wiped off the map, and that the EU should relocate the Jews back to Europe if they feel so guilty about the Holocaust. Here’s his latest, from Tass (HT, Captain Ed):

Islam will soon be the domineering force in the world, placing first in the number of its followers among all other religions. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expressed this confidence here at the end of his state visit to Malaysia. Following a meeting with Sultan Jamalullail I, the supreme head of the federation of nine states where Islam was proclaimed the state religion, he pontificated: “The world will be in the hands of Islam over the next few years.”

We keep asking: what’s his plan? Today, courtesy of Tom McGuire, we have discovered that the United States Army has made available a document outlining Iran’s plans as a nuclear state. The document states that Iran would use its nuclear status to engage in even more terrorism, and that a nuclear Iran would encourage even more proliferation — these are okay points, but they don’t satisfactorily explain to us the incredible cockiness of Ahmadinejad and his seemingly confident predictions about the future. Point two of the document from the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College did provide a potential rationale for Ahmadinejad’s attitude, however:

We have previously mentioned both possibilities, choking off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, or even attacking Saudi Arabia to manipulate oil prices. We note that Jacques Chirac specifically mentioned threats to its “strategic supplies” (ie, oil) when threatening Iran with nuclear weapons in the Chirac Doctrine.

Iran doesn’t have much of a military; its military budget is less than 1% of America’s. But Iran has oil and a very strategic location for the worldwide flow of oil. We think it is quite likely that Ahmadinejad will use Iran’s nuclear weapons to blackmail, cajole, or otherwise control the price and availability of oil. We think that is one of the things that was in Jacques Chirac’s mind as well. And when we look at that map above closely, we perhaps get a better understanding of why the administration and a number of Democrat foreign policy elites want the ports deal to go forward: the United Arab Emirates flanks both sides of the strategic Strait of Hormuz.

Ahmadinejad talks a big game. He can’t play such a game with his minimal conventional forces, but that changes if he can use nuclear blackmail plus his military assets to control a very small bit of the sea to rig oil prices. We have little doubt that he will try to do so.

UPDATE I

The French Intifada of last fall and the cartoon riots take on increased significance in light of this possible strategy of Ahmadinejad. He may not have a large military, but he has an army of dedicated, noisy, and violent Islamists deployed around the globe, with a significant presence in London and Paris, as well as the Islamic world.

We would not be surprised to see Ahmadinejad, with his finely honed skills as a rabble rouser, put these Islamist thugs to work in service of his strategy. For example, what would happen if Ahmadinejad were to explode a couple of Iran’s unimportant facilities and, in the manner of the Reichstag fire, blame the attack in Israel and the United States, and then claim that his mining of the Strait of Hormuz was a defensive act in reprisal for Zionist and Crusader aggression? We all saw the violence in Iraq after the bombing of the Al Askari mosque. What would happen if Ahmeadinejad were to couple an attack on some Potemkin Iranian nuclear support facility with the bombing of some Islamic holy site, and blame everything on the US and Israel? Would the ensuing violence and unrest not exceed that of the cartoon riots? Portraying Iran and Islam as victims of Western oppression, and himself as defender of the Ummah could create some chaos in the streets of mayor European cities, and create a public relations nightmare for the United States, particularly with the assistance of the craven MSM.

In our opinion, it is very dangerous to underestimate the things that this man is capable of doing to further his messianic vision. Indeed, just look at how he is killing US soldiers now (Powerline, Captain Ed) in an act of war and a flouting of the Bush Doctrine, and imagine this guy with a bomb.

UPDATE II

For a different take on Iran, see Christopher Hitchens, who proposes a Nixon goes to China strategy, and calls Ahmadinejad “scrofulous.” We are all for the Hitchens strategy if it would work, though we fear he may relying on a faulty assumption (”Appearances sometimes to the contrary, they are not mad—or not clinically insane in the way that Saddam Hussein was and Kim Jong-il is.”)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 11:33 am and is filed under General, Religion, War, business, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.