If some Iran-watchers in America are to be believed, we could be 48 hours away from the day of judgment.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, has promised to deliver on Tuesday his response to international demands that Iran stop enriching uranium for nuclear use.

By the Islamic calendar, Tuesday is also a holy date: the night when Muhammad rose to heaven from the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on a “buraq”, a fabulous winged beast with the body of a horse and the face of a woman, and reappeared in Mecca.

Will Ahmadinejad seize the moment to unveil the possession of some new fissile material or weapons system — perhaps a nuclear-tipped one?

Bernard Lewis, the West’s foremost scholar of Islam, has even warned that on such a symbolic date it would be wise to bear in mind the possibility of a “cataclysmic” event such as a strike on Israel.

The messianic Shi’ite president could have waited another nine days for the deadline set by the United Nations for his response on nuclear enrichment; but his obsession with theology and numerology appears to be hastening his decision.

He seems in no mood to retreat. “Nuclear power is our right. No one can take this away from us,” he told cheering crowds recently. “Our main task is to develop and build the Iranian nation. No one will stop us.”

That is no idle boast. While all eyes have recently been focused on Israel and the Lebanon, the world may have been looking in the wrong direction. The most serious challenge to the West is not a resurgent Hezbollah but Iran, the guerrillas’ oil-rich patron.

This week, to coincide with Ahmadinejad’s “judgment day” speech, Iran is launching a new round of sabre-rattling military manoeuvres. Nobody has stopped it on its path to nuclear power — and nobody looks likely to.

The European Union, represented by Britain, France and Germany, has spent the past three years trying to talk Iran out of its nuclear programme — to no effect. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have been given the run-around, and last April the Iranian president laid on a ceremony with dancers and doves of peace to celebrate the glorious news, as he put it, that “Iran has joined the countries with nuclear technology”.

The Bush administration, once impatient with EU-IAEA pussyfooting in Iran, is now chastened and divided by its own failure in Iraq.

The war there has been a strategic disaster as far as containing Iran is concerned. Power in Iraq has reverted to the majority Shi’ites, including factions close to the Iranian mullahs; Iranian agents poured into Iraq from the moment Saddam Hussein fell; and, after its experiences of the past three years, the American military has no appetite to take on the well armed and nationalistic Iranians.

The brief war in southern Lebanon — a proxy conflict in which America backed Israel to destroy Iran’s client, Hezbollah — has also failed to fulfil its aims.

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