A Horrific Future, Courtesy of Iran

From Mark Steyn's latest (via LGF); an apocalyptic vision of what the future would be like should Iran's Ahmadinejad get his nukes:

Depending on your own beliefs, Ahmadinejad is either mystical or deranged. In either case, he is exceedingly dangerous. And Iran is just the first. With infinitely accelerated exchanges of information helping develop whole new generations of scientists, extremist countries led by similarly extreme men will be in a position to acquire nuclear weaponry. If nothing is done, we face not proliferation but hyperproliferation. Not just one but many radical states will get weapons of mass extinction, and then so will the fanatical and suicidal terrorists who are their brothers and clients.

That will present the world with two futures. The first is Feynman’s vision of human destruction on a scale never seen. The second, perhaps after one or two cities are lost with millions killed in a single day, is a radical abolition of liberal democracy as the species tries to maintain itself by reverting to strict authoritarianism—a self-imposed expulsion from the Eden of post-Enlightenment freedom.

Can there be a third future? That will depend on whether we succeed in holding proliferation at bay...

There will be no third future, if we wait for the UN to come to a consensus with an unwilling China and Russia, or if we wait for the EU to finish yet another round of cartoonish diplomacy, eagerly playing the buffoons for the amusement of the Islamists.

It is up to us, the hated Americans, to save the world (again, sigh...). Do we have the will? Or has a brutally anti-war media and a disengeneous Democratic party sapped our strength in order to gain a few politcal points? With such a great danger on the horizon, do either of these two liberal organs realize that nothing less than the future of civilization may be at stake? Or is that future less important than a quickie poll-bump one may obtain in the present by taking down our President, our foreign policy, and our troops overseas?

I can't tell you, but ask Hillary, or Russ Feingold, or Teddy Kennedy; this trio seems convinced they have all the answers....