The threat in Iran is grave, even potentially cataclysmic. But that threat is only secondarily the danger to the 62, now 49, American embassy employees imprisoned in Teheran. The main danger is a disastrous war, to be launched by a furious and petulant United States against the people of Iran. For the really scary thing about the still continuing Iranian crisis is not the Shiite zealots led by the venerable Ayatollah Khomeini; it is the barbarous emotions welling up in the breasts of the American people.

For it seems that civilization is only skin-deep, after all, in these United States; let the American eagle be tweaked a bit and savage bellows for war and destruction thunder across the land. If the Ayatollah and his colleagues are “fanatics” and “madmen”, what then are the countless American demonstrators who joyfully burn Iranian flags, chant “Nuke the Iranians” or “Camel Jockeys, Go Home”