With the radioactive mullahs digging in their heels by refusing to abandon their uranium enrichment program – a program that could yield enough fissionable material to make 3-5 nuclear weapons in a matter of months – the likelihood of conflict with Israel and by extension the United States grows daily.

At bottom, the reason is simple, as simple as anything can get in international relations. The Iranian theocracy has pledged itself to wipe the State of Israel off the face of the planet. They see the Jewish state as an abomination before God. This isn’t bombast. It isn’t “rhetoric for domestic consumption” as some in the west would have you believe. For the Iranian theocrats, the goal of destroying Israel is its raison d’etre , its reason for being. They also see Israel as a military threat. And when you combine the real-world strategic calculation of threat with a theological justification for war, you have an extraordinarily explosive and dangerous mixture.

Their view of the United States seems to have come full circle since the mullahs seized power in 1980 from less radical, more nationalistic elements of the revolution. At that time, they viewed us as “The Great Satan” who manipulated Israel as a client state to do our bidding in the middle east. Now that view has changed in that they now see Israel controlling American politics for their own ends. Either way, an Iranian nuclear weapons program threatens Israel with an immediacy that the Jewish state cannot ignore.

WHO ARE THESE GUYS?

The radioactive mullahs who will make the decision for war or peace are not pragmatists or reformers. They are control freaks. From the “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei who heads up the shadowy group of clerics that dictate policy and have virtually unlimited veto power over the legislative and executive branches of government to the equally clandestine network of intelligence and security people that include bully boys from Hezballah and the enforcers who make up the Revolutionary Guards, the Iranian government seeks to coerce its citizens through intimidation and outright terror. Woe betide the luckless Iranian who gets caught in this nexus of brutality.

It’s impossible to estimate the number of regime opponents who’ve been executed in the last 25 years. Most human rights groups put the number at “tens of thousands.” In addition to the executions and outright murders committed by Revolutionary Guards, additional thousands have been assassinated abroad for speaking out against the regime. Certainly the number is approaching 100,000. Iranian bloggers have recently reported the cold blooded murder of the leaders of student protests against the government which means that far from reforming, the bloodthirsty security services will act quickly and ruthlessly to put down any opposition to the cleric’s rule.

Here are some of the key players we’ll be hearing a lot of in the coming months as the showdown with Iran approaches its climax:

Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei

Supreme Leader and Chief of State, Khamenei was appointed for life in 1989 to head up the small group of clerics known as the “Assembly of Experts” who control Iran. Born in 1939, Khamenei was a close associate of the patron saint of the Revolution Ayatollah Khomeini. In 1977, he helped found the Islamic Republic Party which is the major political party that now heads up the coalition of ruling parties that have governed Iran since the revolution. In 1980 as the Iranian students held our diplomats hostage, Khomeini gave Khamenei the position of leader of Friday Congregational Prayers in Tehran. Using this influential position, he rallied the students every week to go into the streets and protest against “The Great Satan.” Perhaps more than any other cleric, Khamenei was responsible for keeping the spirit of anti-Americanism among the students at a fever pitch.

In 1981 he gave a speech denouncing President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who after being summarily dismissed was then executed. From 1981 to 1989, he was President of Iran, garnering 95% of the vote in both his elections and heading up various security committees including being named Commander of the Revolutionary Guards.

Pretty easy to win when voting for your opponent would get you arrested.

Mohammad Khatami

When Khatami was elected President in 1997 with 70% of the vote, high hopes for reforming the theocracy were expressed by both western analysts and Iranian democracy advocates. Alas, such was not the case. Khatami has proven to be a straw man for the clerics. His “reformist” agenda has been stymied at every turn by the mullahs with most of his supporters who dared take his reformist ideas seriously either dead or in jail.

Born in 1943, his father was a good friend of Ayatollah Khomeini. Holding a minor position in the cabinet of his predecessor Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khatami ran a western style Presidential campaign, coming off as a man of the people and a reasonable theocrat. But despite some minor press reforms (since rolled back as the mullahs have cracked down on free speech in the last year) and the election of a pro-reform legislature, Khatami has failed to make a dent in the power wielded by the clerics behind Supreme Leader Khamenei. This is because he has no control over appointments to either the judiciary or the security services. In short, Khatami has a very short leash and has become very adept at not angering the mullahs. His term is up in August which could be right around the time the crisis between Iran and the US/Israel comes to a head.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Elections for President are scheduled for June 17, 2005 at which time it’s believed that Rafsanjani, who already served as President from 1989 to 1997, may once again hold that office. Elected with 95% of the vote (that same brave 5% keeps voting against these guys), Rafsanjani is an enigma.

A free market capitalist who sought to revive Iran’s ruined economy during his term in office, he was widely credited at the time with reopening Iran to investment, especially from Russia and Western Europe. A conservative, it appears that this time, he’ll be running on both a reformist and conservative ticket. Here’s how Forbes described him in an article from 2003:

Ironically, the man most adept at manipulating this hidden power structure is one of Iran’s best-known characters—Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has been named an ayatollah, or religious leader. He was the speaker of parliament and Khomeini’s right-hand man in the 1980s, president of Iran from 1989 to 1997 and is now chairman of the powerful Expediency Council, which resolves disputes between the clerical establishment and parliament. Rafsanjani has more or less run the Islamic Republic for the past 24 years.

He played it smart, aligning himself in the 1960s with factions led by Ayatollah Khomeini, then becoming the go-to guy after the revolution. A hard-liner ideologically, Rafsanjani nonetheless has a pragmatic streak. He convinced Khomeini to end the Iran-Iraq war and broke Iran’s international isolation by establishing trade relations with the Soviet Union, China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. In the 1990s he restarted Iran’s nuclear program. He is also the father of Iran’s “privatization” program. During his presidency the stock market was revived, some government companies were sold to insiders, foreign trade was liberalized and the oil sector was opened up to private companies. Most of the good properties and contracts, say dissident members of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, ended up in the hands of mullahs, their associates and, not least, Rafsanjani’s own family, who rose from modest origins as small-scale pistachio farmers.

Is Rafsanjani enough of a pragmatist to avoid the coming conflict? That depends on how well he can manipulate events in Iran. If he has the confidence of the mullahs (he’s not their first choice at this point) he may be able to convince them that the isolation that Iran will experience if it continues its enriched urnanium program will be ruinous to the economy and set the Revolution back. It would help if, when we go to the United Nations and ask for sanctions (which we will surely do before any military action), that our ostensible allies in Europe and around the world support us in the effort. Unfortunately, at this point it looks as if Russia would veto any sanctions resolution as would the French.

Rafsanjani, who began the Iranian nuclear program in 1990 when he was President, will be reluctant to abandon bomb making unless he thinks the survival of the regime is at stake. Since the only credible threat to the regime comes from the United States military, its up to us to make it clear to Rafsanjani that a nuclear weapon in the hands of radical islamists is unacceptable. Only then will he and the radioactive mullahs consider withdrawing from the brink of catastrophe which would be the certain outcome of any military action taken by the US or Israel against Iran.

Cross Posted at Cao’s Blog and Blogger News Network