Cowboy Confessional

It is not morally wrong to cheer as an evil opponent self destructs. It is however a lousy tactic. The un-statuesque Napoleon once said “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake” and his observation gives me pause – vile nemeses are seemingly self destructing all around the globe and I hesitate to distract them.

The Taliban, Al Qaeda’s intellectual kin, are busily assassinating their own. Ayman “The Hymen” al-Zawahri once commanded to his disgruntled troops to attach Tripoli. Now the Taliban are offing Taliban. Take the unfortunate Qari Zainuddin’s, whose career was cut short by acute lead poisoning – seems he involuntarily consumed a several rounds of AK-47 ammo. Zainuddin had the utter lack of grace to lead about 3,000 fundamentalist in an ongoing crusade against anyone remotely out of step with sharia. But he also displayed bad form in criticizing his superiors for being more brutal than himself.

Never a good idea to antagonize your boss, especially when the boss is armed.

Capping compatriots is a sign of organizational dysfunction. When Al Qaeda in Iraq started collapsing, Osama’s central command called for jihad on jihadists. Threatening your team mates has a peculiar demotivating effect. Killing them even more so. Above all other calamities that can befall a movement, interdepartmental homicide seems to be an early indicator of demise. It doesn’t matter how good a terrorist organization’s dental plan is if member’s are at least six feet away from an in-network provider.

In Iran we see a weirder set of similar symptoms. The Ruling Mullahs (which is not the name of a punk rock band) are fracturing slightly slower than the Taliban, though one has to wonder if their kindred spiritualism will produce the same final outcome. While revolutionaries were being shot in the streets for the sin of supporting a patriarch of Iran’s original Islamic revolution, the maniacal mullahs were arresting children of yet another. For reasons only apparent to syphilitic minds, Iran’s clap clerics decided to indirectly harass Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and the chair of the Assembly of Experts, a group of gurus responsible for electing, monitoring and in untested cases dismissing the Supreme Leader of Iran.

You could say Rafsanjani is an ‘insider.’

There is apparently little love lost between Ayatollah Rafsanjani and Iran’s Lunatic in Chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Perhaps the head goons in Iran’s caliph clique – the ones who tossed the Iranian election to Mahmoud – simply fired a warning shot over Rafsanjani’s administrative bow. Yet metaphoric shots fired as real bullets fly is an omen. The same fissures that divided Al Qaeda in Iraq divided the Taliban once Pakistan kicked their butts back down the Swat valley.

Now familiar fractures are in Iran’s façade.

I suspect the mullahs are feeling a tiny bit threatened. Iran’s recent and thoroughly rigged election was thrown so ungracefully, it appears to have been a panicked reaction. The Persian democratic groundswell was in no small part encouraged by an outbreak of the stuff in the region. To the west is Iraq, a rapidly stabilizing democracy and one that Tehran’s madmen failed to topple during the insurgency. To the east is Afghanistan where both Osama and the Taliban have spiraled into organizational cannibalism as a wobbly democracy grows. Iran’s mullahs know they are next and in an attempt to prevent democracy have initiated their own self-destruct sequence.

None too soon, or at least that is what some lower caste subjects in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Syria and other domino states may be thinking. If Iran swings toward freedom as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan have done in eight short years, other depots for despots might succumb to the momentum. The face of the Middle East has already changed faster and more thoroughly than anyone could have dared wish a decade ago.

The whole joint may be unrecognizable in another.

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