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There are many horrible regimes in the world, oppressing their people and being the cause of many great tragedies — small and great alike. None though, is as worrying and terrible in it’s ambition as the Mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran. These are not leaders satisfied with the power over their country — though this is bad enough — but share and promote a global ideology that is radical Islamism (a political ideology, clearly not to be confused with the religion) and they certainly seem prepared to do a whole lot to realise this idea.

Amir Taheri, once executive editor of the biggest Iranian newspaper, explains the outlook of the Iranian leadership as he understands it, in an article in The Telegraph.

According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World. In every generation, the Imam chooses 36 men, (and, for obvious reasons, no women) naming them the owtad or “nails”, whose presence, hammered into mankind’s existence, prevents the universe from “falling off”. Although the “nails” are not known to common mortals, it is, at times, possible to identify one thanks to his deeds. It is on that basis that some of Ahmad-inejad’s more passionate admirers insist that he is a “nail”, a claim he has not discouraged. For example, he has claimed that last September, as he addressed the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York, the “Hidden Imam drenched the place in a sweet light”.

Last year, it was after another khalvat that Ahmadinejad announced his intention to stand for president. Now, he boasts that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a “clash of civilisations” in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the “infidel” West, led by the United States, and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that, in military jargon, sounds like a low intensity, asymmetrical war.

In the article Mr Taheri spells out Ahmadinejad’s strategical thinking, based on the weak infidel West who falls back and retreats under every threat and after every backlash. And unfortunatly he is not proven wrong by a history involving virtually no response to an act of war (the overtaking of the US Embassy in Teheran), and even less of a response to a death sentence layed upon a foreign citizen (the fatwa on British author Salman Rushdie). I’m sure there are more examples.

Is Mr Taheri right in his description? Maybe. Maybe not. It’s hard for me to tell, but there is a chilling twisted logic to it all. It’s not easy to be optimistic about the future in light of a threat like this one, and it’s even harder to decide on a good strategy to combat it. But a good start is for us to stop being ashamed of the universal values of tolerance, free speech and freedom of religion, that earlier generations have fought for in the West.

I maintain my position of regime change needing to be the goal of any strategy, but how to achieve that is rather unclear. Is it possible to have them overthrown by aiding opposition forces? Will that take too long to prevent Iran from aquiring nukes — something that is obviously very dangerous? Indeed, is there a way at all to do that? It seems to me that a bombing campaign has a fairly small chance of being successful in disarming Iran, and even less so in getting rid of the Mullahs. Tough questions to answer, but we need to find answers to them. And I fear the longer we wait, the worse our options will be.