Again, as it has for more than two thousand years, the new Persian new year at the spring equinox, will be celebrated not only in Iran and Afghanistan but throughout much of central Asia and in the Arab Persian Gulf states. The mullahs now trying to run the country will do everything they can to minimize this pre-Islamic commemoration. But celebrations are likely to be one more evidence of the bloody but increasingly tenuous grip the feuding and corrupt religious fanatics have on power.

There is little doubt the mullahs are trying to build nuclear weapons. Why else, if as they say, they were simply contemplating peaceful atomic power, did they hide their pursuit of enriched uranium from the International Atomic Energy Commission for 18 years. Yet, with the Bush Administration’s domestic opposition never tiring of reminding the world Washington [as the rest of the world’s intelligence community] miscalculated Sadam Hussein’s weapons, accusations against the mullahs are often met with disdain. Nor do those same opponents of the Administration help when they minimize the possibility, or even threaten to negate with legislation, any U.S. military effort to end Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.

All this is reinforced by a spreading fatalism about any attempt to restrict nuclear weapons. It follows failure to halt nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan, failure so far to backtrack North Korea toward nuclear disarmament, and growing blackmarkets in nuclear materials Washington’s decision — made almost by happenstance and lobbying by a former ambassador — to go forward with high technological transfers including nuclear to India, have fed this phenomenon. Never was it expressed so openly by a major power than when France’s lame-duck President Jacques Chirac recently blundered into a semi-public admission he saw Iranian nuclear weapons as inevitable. How then to interpret France and other U.S. Western allies’ feckless discussions with the mullahs, their faint-hearted effort at UN sanctions.

Yet, nuclear arms in hands of the thugs who have aided and abetted terrorism — including Hizbollah attacks on the U.S. a variety of places over a decade, killing more Americans than any other terrorist movement before 9/11 — would constitute an enormous destabilization, not only of the Middle East, but to the whole world economy. It has to be remembered the Shah whom the mullahs dethroned, then one of America’s closest allies, was nevertheless instrumental in the attempt to create an all powerful price monopoly under OPEC. Ultimately it has been the obscene accumulation of vast oil wealth in the hands of a few of the world’s most reactionary regimes which has led to the reemergence of historic Islamic fanaticism and terror.

The Tehran mullahs are playing a high risk game. Their economy is fragile — growing unemployment and falling living standards for a rapidly mushrooming population [one quarter of its 70 million under 15]. Multiethnic Iran is full of dissent, not least among Arabs in the southwestern oilfields. It is an index to its bankruptcy Tehran imports almost half of a rapidly growing domestic consumption of oil products. Yet the country has the world’s second largest proved oil reserves and probably a similar gas ranking.

Because Iran’s own development coffers are bare, it is desperately seeking to entice foreign investment into its increasingly decrepit oil industry. The U.S. unilateral sanctions have restrained some investors — an American law requires sanctions against any company domestic or foreign which invests there. That has backed the Japanese from a huge oil deal, kept BP [beleaguered on other fronts but a major North American actor] from investing in its historic “homeland” as Anglo-Persian.

But Washington may have to do more than show its teeth with a recent agreement with Tehran announced by Spain’s Repsol and Shell. And, of course, the Chinese, already one of Iran’s best customers, are about to make a major new investment.

Progress toward a bomb would not only enhance the mullahs’ prestige – even anti-mullah Iranians have made the argument it has as much right as India and Pakistan to such weapons in a troubled Middle East. It would increase their growing influence among the Arabs and their long-oppressed Shia minorities, especially the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, many of whom have historically looked to the Persians for leadership. [Bahrain, where unfortunately the American Fifth Gulf Fleet is based, has a restive Shia majority under a Sunni ruler, much of which is Persian speaking.]

Israel is probably correct in seeing the mullahs’ nuclear weapons aimed at them. The Iranian fanatics have never made any secret of that. If nothing more, it would encourage the Arabs in one more of their failed efforts to drive the Jews into the sea. And despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s professions he opposes Iranian nuclear weapons, he continues to facilitate them through sales of nuclear technology [and missiles], apparently seeing their inevitability as does Chirac, and tries to seduce Tehran into a gas OPEC along with other large scale producers as LNG becomes a major factor in world energy trading.

Thus Washington’s efforts to wage economic warfare against an aggressive Iran — and its threatened domination of the Persian Gulf’s massive oil and gas wealth — as well as its loudly publicized reinforcements of the Fifth Fleet, fitting Israeli fighter-bombers with in-flight refueling capacity for a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, and the diplomatic effort with its NATO allies for a common front against Tehran, are all part of a larger strategy. It could, in its way, be more important than the current debate — or even the immediate outcome — of the struggle in Iraq.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.