Daniel Ellsberg must surely support Ahmadinejad getting nukes. There are no two ways about it. In a forthcoming article in  Harper's Magazine, Ellsberg is going to call for moles in the Bush Administration to leak any plans to stop Ahmadinejad's rush to nukes —— presumably to the New York Times.

Thousands of people will read Ellsberg's article, and some will resolve to sabotage American plans to stop rogue regimes with nuclear bombs —— not just the Khomeini Armageddon cult in Tehran, but Libya, North Korea, Hugo Chavez' Venezuela, the Maoists in Nepal, you name it. There's a logic to this madness: It is Lenin's logic that things must get worse to become better. By destroying the only effective way to suppress nuclear proliferation —— some alliance of sane nations led by the United States —— the Left expects that nuclear warfare will destroy the nation state, leading to an internationalist order controlled by the Left itself. That seems to be the scarcely hidden agenda behind Ellsberg's article.

It is in fact one possible future for the world today. Iran's rise to nuclear status will give it control over the Persian Gulf, and, if unopposed, it will be able to govern the crucial religious centers of Islam in Mecca and Medina. It is a madman's dream. The Khomeini suicide cult will have decisive power over the world's oil supply going through the Gulf, and the tiny emirates will simply crumble.

Tehran's missiles even now are within reach of Europe, which lacks the spine to stand up to internal and external Islamist threats. Islamist revolutions will overthrow moderate regimes in Egypt and nuclear Pakistan. Europe will be neutered, and Islamofascism will once more become an expansionist force, just as the hordes of Arab Islam conquered the centers of civilization beginning in Mohammed's time. Somewhere along the line nuclear warfare will either happen, or it will become so imminent that nations will voluntarily surrender their sovereignty to an international government with immense power. Think Kofi Annan in control of all the nuclear weapons in the world. If things get bad enough, such a scenario is not clinically mad, though it means a tyrannical dictatorship in permanent control of large parts of the world. Things must get worse to get better.

Not everyone may remember that Ellsberg famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, thereby disastrously undermining US support for the Vietnam War, leading the US Congress to withdraw funding for the American effort to put the South in charge of its own fate. The upshot was  the scene of chaos and panic while desperate Vietnamese clung to US helicopters lifting up from the roof of the US Embassy. Those Vietnamese had everything to fear from the victorious North, and if they were lucky they only ended up in vast Stalinist concentration camps along with hundreds of thousands of others.

We do not know exactly how many people died by execution, starvation, forced labor, collectivization, and all the usual horrors of Communist revolutionary regimes. Pathetic news photos followed in the years afterwards, showing Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing Ho Chi Minh's paradise in their thousands on frail craft and often drowning in their desperation to get away. Next door in Cambodia, Pol Pot began his genocidal massacres free from any possible American interference. The Americans were gone.

In the upshot, Ellsberg was imminently responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Vietnam and Cambodia. On the American Left this not considered a crime against humanity. Ellsberg is a celebrity well within the mainstream of the Left. They may not say so out loud, but the bottom line is that they want more of the same. Ellsberg is a leftist mole in the tradition of the physicist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project and promptly defected to the Soviet Bloc, thereby providing Stalin (and later Mao) with their nuclear weapons. Different in degree, perhaps, but not in kind. Fuchs was a hero in Stalinist East Germany as a result of his betrayal, just as Ellsberg is a hero on the American Left as a result of his.

Within the closed mind—set of the Left such a course of action appears to be sane. If Bush is Hitler, Ahmadinejad is a useful Stalin. There will of course be some thousands of inevitable deaths, but you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. It's all worth it, because it will lead to lasting peace on earth.

The world today is therefore caught between two kinds of apocalyptic cults: Islamofascists and the Hard Left. Both are willing to have a nuclear armageddon to achieve their aim of paradise on earth. Ahmadinejad's paradise is Allah's, while the paradise of the Left is the crumbling of the nation state in favor of an internationalist tyranny. It means peace forever at the cost of liberty forever. In Francis Fukuyama's terms, it would truly be the End of History.

Fortunately there is a saner scenario. It is for the United States to lead a coalition of civilized nations to suppress the spread of nuclear weapons to suicidal regimes. That is the course the Bush Administration is embarked upon. It is a course fraught with uncertainties. Every step will be fought by the Left, even after Ahmadinejad explodes his Bomb. Just as the Left ferociously fought any defense against nuclear attack, it will also fight a sane alliance to stop nuclear proliferation.

If that sounds pessimistic, it's not necessarily so. It is only a variant of the Cold War, with the additional complication of a true fascist ideology arising from Sunni and Shi'a Islam; but even that isn't new. It is only a reprise of Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini. The Soviet Union is no longer the center of the Hard Left in the world; instead, it is the fascists who now have access to state power in Tehran and perhaps other places, while the Left is just a Fifth Column. The Free World is still under assault; it is just the correlation of forces that has changed.

The civilized world won the Cold War when the Soviet Union crumbled, but ideologies do not go away so easily. They live on in the minds of men and women. There has been some debate about what to call the current conflict: Is it World War III or IV? We obviously hope fervently that it will be neither; with luck and good management, we are now being dragged into Cold War II. Cold War II is survivable, but it will not be easy.

James Lewis is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.