Wine-swilling Womanizing Mullahs

Some weeks back, on my return flight from Port Blair to Chennai, I had my first opportunity ever, due to a most welcome oversight on the part of the Jet Airways check-in clerk, to be bumped up to Business Class. All the more fortunate was I to be seated beside a most charming North Indian gentleman, who traveled frequently in his work as a senior executive in an international aid organization. Naturally, the nation I wanted to hear most about, after precursory introductions about shopping in Dubai, was Iran – the country whose people, food, carpets, cinema and poetry I love to love, and whose theocratic government I love to hate.

As it turns out, on one occasion, my in-flight travel companion had been invited to attend the wedding of the daughter of a senior cleric in the government. Liquor flowed as freely as the scantily-clad dancing girls sashayed (and more) for the pleasure of the invited guests, which included no small number of regime VIPs.

Later, in Bangalore, I met two adorable Iranian students, one from Shiraz studying engineering, and his friend from Bandar Abbas studying occupational therapy. They had girlfriends from India’s Northeast, whose culture is a good deal more permissive than the rest of Hindustan. Over an exquisite dinner of deep-fried pork, sashimi and sake in a lovely Japanese restaurant, they corroborated the likelihood story recounted to me in the air.

That the mullahs are wine-swilling womanizers does not render them all the more odious in my eyes. Quite the opposite. It shows that they are not the messianic religious fanatics with their fingers ever-ready to press the nuclear button, as they would have us believe. No, they, like us, are firmly rooted in the material world, rational, and with the desire (and means) to enjoy the good things in life.

Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, perhaps the richest man in the Islamic Republic, most personifies the image described above. What’s more, he was recently elected to the Assembly of Experts, and seems plausibly poised to make a run for Supreme Leader, once Ali Khamenei, the current occupant of the post, rumored to be very ill, goes the way of all flesh.

The Iranian people see through the façade of Rafsanjani’s clerical turban. This is perhaps his greatest virtue. A deal can be done with him. The one fly in the ointment is current President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who actually adheres to his religion and fervently subscribes to the 12th Imam messianic doctrine. Ironically, he is widely perceived as uncorrupt, which I am inclined to believe. That said, he is jostling for the power to blow up the world. Talk about the lesser of two evils.

Notwithstanding the upcoming power struggle in Iran, meanwhile, the Islamic Republic and the US are duking it out by proxy in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. The Americans pretty much have no choice, by the Bush Administration’s colossal stupidity, but to hand Iraq to the mullahs on a silver platter. One can only hope that Bashar Assad does not succeed in goading Israel’s hand-wringing, inept government into another war this summer over the Golan Heights – the result of which would be the same – cession in an exchange of land for peace. It’s Israel’s choice whether they want to part with it sans or avec Revolutionary Guard-supplied Katyushas and Fajars falling all over the country. As for Lebanon, hope is fast fading.

But these really are side issues, being used to up the ante and conduct diplomacy by force of arms over the big prize: the mullahs’ lunge for nukes. And here’s where there just may be a glimmer of hope. Skye Frontier believes that if those pork-chomping, whiskey-guzzling, coke-snorting, bum-fucking ayatollahs are faced with a credible threat of loss of such privileges, being rational, they are likely to climb down from the atomic tree, provided that a few face-saving gestures are visibly made for public consumption.

That means that the West, lead by the US, supported by the EU and NATO, and of course by Israel, although more discreetly, all get up off their fannies pronto and put it in no uncertain terms. Perhaps we could then set in motion the eventual denuclearization of the entire Middle East, that volatile power keg that threatens daily to engulf the entire world in the fires of Hell.