History in the Making, Far From Iowa’s Caucuses: Iran was the first harbinger of radical Islam.

The New York Observer ^ | January 26, 2004 | Richard Brookhiser

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The charm of Iowa and New Hampshire: Canadian air masses; black ice and small towns; armies of journalists,clubby and obtuse; projections that do not project, experts who do not know; and finally, the candidates and their campaigns, multimillion-dollar insta-corporations careening to destruction, or surviving for another shot at becoming the Most Powerful People in the World. All of this is based on the say-so of yokels who were lucky enough to erect their peculiar political institutions on the equivalent of the Comstock Load, the system we wish Afghanistan and Iraq to emulate.

At the end of his book Five Days in London: May 1940, John Lukacs said that we were now entering an age of "global democracy — unquestioned democracy, with its unforeseeable circumstances and conditions and perils." What he saw is the same thing that a host of other observers, from Francis Fukuyama to V.S. Naipaul, have spotted — the insistence of people, all over the world, that their self-esteem be ratified. Once we lived in social structures that gave us whatever gratification we needed. Now these structures have lost the ability to soothe, even if they retain the power to control. Hence the itch for individual acknowledgment. Hence democracy.

But democracy, as we know, can give people what they want, and much, much more. Demagogues promise self-esteem and hand out concentration camps. So do insane religions. (Mr. Lukacs’ book was a thank-you note to Winston Churchill for holding off the era of global democracy, in an early, sinister incarnation led by the Führer.) Another sinister incarnation is upon us, in the form of radical Islam. For that reason, the most important political events in the world are happening not in Iowa and New Hampshire, but in Iran — and not in the elections scheduled for February, but in the hearts and minds of the Iranian people.

Iran was the first harbinger of radical Islam, when the Ayatollah Khomeini took power there in 1979. The Shah, whom Khomeini deposed, was an old-fashioned despot and an old-fashioned modernizer. He represented a brummagem royal dynasty that was only a few generations old. He gained status (he thought) by hobnobbing with American Presidents and the international jet set. He built the usual dams, power projects and urban slums.

The Ayatollah Khomeini was light-years ahead of him in media savvy. Long before the Internet, he got his message out via tapes of his sermons. He incarnated democracy, because he told Iranians that they could rise up, in the name of their faith, and change their situation. And behold, they did.

Iranians have now had almost a quarter of a century to admire their handiwork. Women must be covered, books smuggled. Their rulers defended their country against Saddam Hussein with human waves of suicidal boy-warriors. They have spent their resources more recently in blowing up Jews and trying to build atom bombs. The ruling elite is as corrupt as the nation is poor; their clerics’ robes are chiefly good for hiding cash. The only rules they truly care about are those that spring from sexual obsessiveness, or that preserve their own power.

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[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

Thank Jimmy Carter for Islamic terror.

If he had acted wisely against Iran in 1979 and flattened them then, the message would have been sent and understood.