Another Supreme Leader Bites The Dust?

Mayhap Ali Khamenei is dead and mayhap he ain't. But that won't change the nature of the Iranian regime or its Naziesque drive to obtain a nuclear arsenal by any means necessary and use it against Israel and America as soon as they possess it.

They're at war with us, and have been since I was in the ninth grade. And after twenty-seven years of conflict kept just muted enough to keep us a quiescent and somnolently self-deluded giant oblivious to the mullahs' "death by a bazillion cuts" strategy, they're at the point of not needing to pretend not to fight it anymore.

But as is still disspiritingly the case, it is the enemy within, not the enemies without, that are the biggest threat to America's existence. Jules Crittendon lays out the stakes of the 2006 electorate getting what they voted for:

Pull out. Achieve short-term gratification for those who believe our absence from Iraq will solve our problems. Watch Iraq descend into further violence. Watch a nuclear-armed Iran come to dominate Iraq and the world's richest oil fields.

No longer a world power, discredited by our own choice, we can watch the pile of bodies mount. Maybe we'll be restored to our national senses, as we were a decade after Vietnam, when we woke up and realized we never really had the luxury of disengaging from the fight.

This time, it will be harder. It won't be so neatly contained as it was then. The only good side to this is the army gets to rest. Don't count on the Democratic Congress to refit or build it up, or to do anything but dither when we need to use it again.

More likely, a dispirited people, our army broken by defeat, we'll just wait to see who emerges as the new world power. It will be a while before there is one, and much longer before there is one we would care to live under. I predict a dark age, in which brutal second-rate powers such as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea do what they choose to whom they choose without restraint. An age of modern warlords, with no over-arching, feared power to keep them in check. We can watch the sick man that is Europe slowly succumb. We can watch small free nations try to fend for themselves. We can await the inevitable nuclear crisis.

Does that sound at all medieval or apocalyptic? It is....Does it sound overly melodramatic and alarmist? If so, you're a fool with no understanding of history. I have bad news for you. The fight against evil in this world is business as usual. It never ends.

Which, logically, means that those who refuse to recognize and carry on that fight are part of that evil as well, whether out of weakness or malevolence.

Reportedly President Bush is going to announce this week a recommitment to stablizing Iraq no matter the cost. There are also reports of more American naval and air forces being moved into the Persian Gulf region, which may harbinge an at-long-last showdown with Iran.

And we've already seen the new Donk junta's reaction.

Another report has General David Petraeus, the President's latest choice for command of Coalition forces in Iraq, being just the sort of man the Democrats will obstruct at all costs.+

It appears that the ultimate showdown shaping up might just be in D.C. after all, with the one in the Middle East being the anti-climactic afterthought. If so, that will raise Dubya back to the heroic levels of 2001-03, and may salvage his presidential legacy.

God willing, he will, and will succeed. And I can also only hope that when he made his decision, somewhere in his rhetoric he used the phrase, "[Bleep] the New Tone, I'm saving the country instead." Because otherwise the Supreme Leader that falls may not be Ayahtollah Khamenei after all, whether or not he's assumed room temperature.