Remember that much of U.S. Christian support for Israel comes, not from love of Jews or Judaism, but from seeing the return of Jews to Palestine as a prophesied sign of the End. All that's necessary is for a major conflict to break out in the Valley of Megiddo, not far from Jerusalem, and voila - it's a wrap.
Hojjatieh is a group founded in Iran a half-century ago that looks for the same kind of death-and-disaster scenario, except it believes the Mahdi (or Mehdi), the 'occluded' 12th Imam will come back, not Jesus. (See www.regimechangeiran.blogspot.com, October 6 2005, for more details on this). Mesbah-Yazdi is a firm believer in this, and so whatever produces the most chaos and catastrophe is welcomed as a means of drawing the Mahdi out of hiding. If your prophecy won't come true, give it a little help.
The fact that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the recently named President of Iran, is one of the Ayatollah's disciples, is the reason he has become better known and more powerful. While other factions in the grim soap-opera that is Iranian politics have been wary of pushing the nuclear program too hard, Hojjatieh, clearly, has a vested interest in instigating a radioactive holocaust A.S.A.P.
As my regular readers know - both of you - I happen to believe that somehow, some way, destruction of this type is perpetually postponed because we have all decided not to die en masse. To die in masses, yes - the Kashmir earthquake is the latest event to show that. But total extermination, a serious possibility for the 60 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, seems to have been taken off the menu. For what it's worth, I offer my full conscious support for this. But the idea that if things only get bad enough, then they must get spectacularly better, is precisely what I was writing about in the recent post on Enantiodromia. By this reasoning, Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi is a truly enlightened man except for one small detail. That is, enantiodromia is a condition inherent in the universe - an expression of the Will of God, if you prefer such terminology - and is not subject to any one person's will. Nobody can bring about the End, whether by prayer, supporting immigration to Israel or building nuclear weapons.
Curiously, the past couple of weeks have seen an eruption of violence on the domestic front in Iran. Student riots, feminist demonstrations (yes Virginia, there are Islamic feminists, and they're very unhappy right now) a highly restive population of under-employed and cynical young people, the terrorist bombs planted in Ahvaz as well as jostling at the higher political levels, have all shown an instability and a move towards change.
True Will has its own wild, unpredictable ways of emerging. And it never apologises for using them.