My friend and colleague posted an except from Bob Baer’s ‘The Devil We Know: Dealing With The New Iranian Superpower”. The prologue provides an interesting, and frankly a little scary, overview of the rise of Iran. Here is a little piece that kinda wierded me out.

Scratch away the veneer of Islam, and what you find in an Iranian is old-fashioned nationalism-a deep, abiding defiance of colonialism. Keep scratching and what you find at the bottom of Iran’s soul is a newfound taste for empire. It runs through Iranian society, even among more secular Iranians. But Iran isn’t a new Rome, intent on naked conquest, cultural diffusion, settlements, and religious conversion.

What drives Iran to empire is something different. Call it destiny, entitlement, or even manifest destiny: what’s critical to understand is that Iran today has an unshakable belief in its right to empire. It means to achieve this through proxy warfare and control over oil supplies.

It’s not hard to understand where Iran got the confidence, misplaced or not, that it can beat the West. In Lebanon, from 1982 to 2000, Iran’s proxy Hezbollah beat the Israelis on the field of battle, the first time Israel’s army had lost since the country’s founding in 1948. Israel claims it wasn’t defeated militarily in the conflict, that they lost only the will to fight and not the war. But in the 34-day Lebanon war in 2006, the Israeli army was in fact beaten. It retreated from Lebanon with heavy losses and without obtaining a single objective.

Iran’s star is rising. And now with a friendly Shia government in Baghdad, it will rise a lot faster. On the other hand, the old Sunni order-the foundation of American interests in the Middle East-is edging toward collapse. How long can Pakistan and Saudi Arabia hold on? For the first time in the history of Islam, Shia domination of Mecca is not unthinkable. Nor is an Iranian empire in the Middle East. Was Khomeini right after all, that Iran would ultimately defeat America, the Great Satan?

It definitely makes me believe that Obama’s concept of engaging Iran rather than alienating them makes more sense…or we’ll find ourselves deeper and deeper in the quagmire of the Middle East.