Ahmadinnejhad (l) and Moussavi

In a vote at the UN scheduled for later today, the Security Council is expected to pass resolution 1929 (a portentous number, perhaps) imposing a new round of sanctions on Iran regarding its aim of developing atomic weapons.

Iran has always denied the existence of such plans, but then it would. Most UN security council members don’t believe the regime, and will vote through the sanctions. However, Brazil, Turkey and Lebanon have long made their opposition to the move known, operating as they are on a different continent and agenda respectively.

While the domino theory is not universally applicable, it almost certainly is about the advance of Islamism. Iraq will be the next to go and – when the Brits run out of money and the Americans of interest – the crazed Talibani lunatics will be back in Afghanistan for good. Turkey is already a target…..and is clearly becoming more Islamist, as its ludicrous behaviour about the Gaza flotillas has demonstrated disturbingly well.

We are engaged in the first Holy ‘world’ war for nearly a thousand years, but the irony is that our ‘side’ is overwhelmingly agnostic and largely uninterested. And while we regard fundamentalist Islam as based on a mediaeval level of ignorance, our grasp of the Islamist viewpoint is far more dangerously ignorant.

My fear is not that Islamism can win: once it does something really dumb (as it will sooner or later) the West’s ignorance will be turned into the violent version of bigotry – rage against all adherents of the faith. Rather, my anxiety centres on the agnostic mob and global military exacting a terrible revenge in which millions of innocent people will suffer.

Iran is the most stupid and hardline of the Islamist States. Ahmadinnejhad is a self-deluded, puffed-up psychotic who suffers from the ridiculous over-confidence that always comes with his condition – and conditioning. He’s a former espionage agent and a clever manipulator of the media environment; but like Hitler, he underestimates what will happen once his egomania goes too far.

What is too often assumed in the West is that those who demonstrated against Ahmaddinnejhad’s (obviously fixed) election are somehow Western-orientated heroes. They are not at all: in their own way, most of them would be equally difficult to bring into the club of sane nations.

I can do little better than point you at an outstanding piece of investigative journalism about this very subject by Geoffrey Robertson writing at The Daily Beast. Robertson shows – leaving little room for doubt – that the Iranian opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi is a murderous man, whose only argument with I’m a Dinnerjacket is that he (Mir) lost, and Mahmoud the mad won.

‘First of all, know your enemy’ as the Chinese general wrote.