So far we have been spared the sight of mobs of dishevelled fanatics chanting “Death to Argentina!” in the centre of Teheran, but the way things are going it may not be long before Cristina joins the leaders of the US, the UK and Israel to form a satanic quartet that allegedly spends its days and nights plotting against the Islamic revolution. To her credit, Cristina has not flinched from demanding that half a dozen Iranian heavies be made to answer for their alleged role in blowing up the AMIA building fifteen years ago, an atrocity in which 85 people lost their lives and many more were grievously injured. Among those suspected of organizing it is Ahmad Vahidi, the individual Iran ’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants as his defence minister. To nobody’s surprise, the Iranians reacted with indignation when the Foreign Ministry protested vigorously against Vahidi’s nomination, accusing Cristina’s government of giving in to “Zionist pressures, bribes and propaganda,” which is their way of saying that only Jews should feel upset about the attack on the community centre or, for that matter, the one on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. From their twisted viewpoint, nobody has a right to complain if they do their religious duty by killing Jews wherever they may be.

The government must hope that the row with Iran’s unlovely regime soon peters out, as what are derisively called diplomatic spats usually do. The people it is up against are among the most vicious on earth. If, as the government believes, they were capable of ordering terrorist proxies to perpetrate a massacre in the heart of Buenos Aires fifteen years ago in retaliation, according to some, for president Carlos Menem’s decision to scrap a nuclear deal made by his predecessor, Raúl Alfonsin, they would be unlikely to have any scruples about doing something equally brutal now just to tell Argentina it would be in her interest to back off.

Such degenerate Western concepts as humanitarian feelings cut little ice in Iran’s ruling circles. Like many militant Moslems, whether their fellow Shiites or the Sunnis they hate, Ahmadinejad and his friends think they have the whip hand over the infidels because they are not weakened by any desire to stay alive. They made that horribly plain during the war they fought against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq : thousands of Iranian children aged between 9 and 16, holding plastic keys made in Taiwan they were told would unlock the gates of paradise, met their deaths clearing mine fields for adult soldiers. According to some, reports the regime is currently recruiting large number of youngsters for suicide missions both at home and abroad.

The dispute between Argentina and Iran has resurfaced at a particularly dangerous moment. The mullahs’ theocratic regime lost what legitimacy it had in last June’s elections, which Ahmadinejad “won” by a supposedly lopsided margin thanks to an insultingly blatant fraud, and enormous crowds flooded the streets of Teheran and other cities in protests that soon turned violent. Exactly what is happening in Iran right now is hard for anyone to discern, but it would appear that a significant part of the population is fed up not only with the ghoulish Ahmadinejad but also with the very idea that clerics have a God-given right to rule them.

If the Islamic revolution is indeed dying in Iran , its death throes will be ugly indeed. Its leaders are not the kind of people who would resign themselves to going gently into the good night. Armoured with the knowledge that a merciless deity is on their side, they can be relied on to put up a ferocious fight against their local enemies and, if they manage it, those terrible Zionists whose bastion, Israel , they have vowed to wipe off the map.
Though the Iranian regime can count on the services of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and has an alliance of sorts with Syria, it is internationally isolated. Its Arab neighbours, may of whom have large Shiite minorities, fear it and quietly hope that Israel will put a sudden end to its efforts to acquire a usable nuclear arsenal. Further afield, it enjoys the enthusiastic support of Hugo Chávez who, incongruously, is one of Cristina’s best friends in Latin America and other troublemakers such as Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, none of whom are disturbed by the thought that in the unlikely event of a worldwide Islamic revolution they would be certain to share the unpleasant fate of Iranian leftists who helped the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrow the Shah but were then slaughtered for their pains.

Crunch time is fast approaching. Barack Obama seems to have belatedly appreciated that the Iranian theocrats are immune to his charismatic blandishments, and that it would do him no good to go down in history as the US president who let such an appalling regime get the Bomb. As for the Israelis, who have good reason to suspect that the mullahs think their country would be an ideal test site, they are in two minds over whether to try and live with the threat of instant annihilation, a second holocaust, hanging over them, or to attempt to eliminate it even though that would mean setting of a potentially horrendous Middle Eastern war. This being so, being included among Iran’s main enemies is hardly risk-free but, given the role that according to investigators Iranian leaders played in the attack on the AMIA community centre, there is no way Argentina can remain on the sidelines.