NEVER UNDERESTIMATE a revolutionary regime. In particular, never underestimate the durability of the revolutionaries' fervor to fight for their cause.
The French Revolution began in 1789, but it was only after two decades of war that the fight was finally knocked out of it. The Russian Revolution began in 1917, but the Soviet Union posed a mortal threat until the mid-1980s. As for the Communist Chinese revolution of 1949, it was only last month that the regime in Beijing was threatening to go nuclear over Taiwan.
People in the English-speaking world never give up hoping that the revolutionaries will suddenly see the advantages of peace, the rule of law and representative government. That may be because they think their own revolutions -- the English Revolution of the 1640s and the American Revolution of the 1770s -- followed that pattern. Yet there was no more bellicose British government than Cromwell's. And the United States was scarcely a peaceful power as it expanded from sea to shining sea in the century after independence.
So it was pure fantasy to imagine that the Islamic Republic of Iran, founded in revolutionary year 1979, was just about to mutate into a friendly democracy. Yet people did. "In Iran," President Bush declared in a speech in November 2003, "the demand for democracy is strong and broad." Dream on. Far from being on the brink of democracy, Iran is now on the brink of becoming the single biggest threat to democracy in the world.
Last Monday, the Iranian government flatly rejected a European package of political and economic incentives to halt its covert nuclear weapons program. With a defiant flourish, the Iranians reopened their uranium-conversion plant at Isfahan. The Iranians say their aim is merely to become a "nuclear fuel producer and supplier within a decade." Given that they are among the biggest oil producers in the world, this rush toward nuclear power is a mite suspicious. It's certainly not motivated by a desire to combat global warming.
The reality is that an Iranian nuke could be a reality within a decade, if not sooner. All the Iranians need is time -- and this we seem to be giving them.
The problem is that, once again, the West is divided and the international community stalemated. Britain, France and Germany have long favored diplomatic carrots. The U.S. might once have preferred a military stick, but is now too tied up in neighboring Iraq to relish the prospect even of air strikes.
