Robert Gates' dreamland

America is getting a new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, who has just sent several signals to Iran, Israel and other nations closely involved with Iran's war of terror, from threats of genocide to ravaging Mesopotamia.

Gates has shown that he can snore through a pro forma confirmation hearing as well as any senator. He agrees that Iran is pursuing atomic weapons capabilities and that its leaders are lying about this development (no kidding). More interestingly, he added that no one, certainly not he, civilian head of the American Armed Forces can (will) provide assurance that Israel will not be nuked by Iran. He added that Iran's atomic weapons program is "a deterrent against nuclear powers surrounding it, Pakistan in the east, Russia in the north, Israel to the west and America in the Persian Gulf." Hmmm …

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Gates is a close associate of George H. W. Bush and James Baker, head of the Iraq Study Group (the Baker Group) that calls for more "negotiations" with Syria and Iran to resolve their problems with us. Joel Himmelfarb, in a piece published by the American Spectator and the Wall Street Journal has detailed the decades of attempts by America to dialog with Iran and Syria, a self-destructive process in which peace and honesty recede.

With his testimony to a complacent Senate, Gates sent several important signals: 1) that the American government will not protect Israel against an Iranian nuclear attack, and 2) that Israel is a nuclear power that threatens Iran and that merits being compared to Russia or Pakistan.

Gates is a friend neither of the American nor the Israeli people, nor of their embattled sovereign nations.

Israel's nuclear capability is an official secret. Gates helped shred what remains of that strategic deniability. Other statements were more damaging: He equated Israel and America and their nuclear capabilities with those of Pakistan and Russia. Given the radically (from the root) different nature of these two pairs of nations, this is an extremely dishonest and damaging equation of a kind you might expect from the head of a "non-aligned" nation.

It also is dishonest because it is Iran that blatantly and consistently threatens Israel with annihilation; so do other terror groups like Hamas, Iran's Hezbollah, Syria, assorted Islamic media and clergy, and the EU in its quaint Eurabian way.

Before considering an intriguing Iranian TV show, we should note that by refusing to provide assurance that America would defend anyone, specifically Israel, from Iranian nuclear attack, Mr. Gates repeated Ambassador April Glaspie's indirect invitation to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. (The State Department in 1956 passed a similar message regarding Hungary to Russia via Yugoslavia). So, if Iran attacks Israel, America will watch and then respond: There goes deterrence.

That's how it is in Oz on the Potomac.

A fascinating episode in the Iranian science fiction television series, "The Land of Wishes," offers perspective on these matters in an episode called "The Medal" (it's a Star of David), which may be viewed at the Middle East Media Research Institute.

The plot is as simple as black and white, and the message is clever, clear and genocidal. The heroine is Fahimeh, a lovely Persian maiden of about 14 years, clothed in a gray body and head robe and accompanied by a "here again, gone again" animated spirit, Kashki: baggy pants, boots, sword, cool hat and cute, encouraging messages.

Fahimeh has been summoned by an evil Jewish queen who rules from the Black House (a massive temple with a gigantic stone courtyard). The queen's religion is indicated by an enormous Star of David she wears on her breast. Another Magen David surmounts the temple's front door.

The evil queen isn't quite human: She's powered by a nuclear-generated force that enters her head via gadgets manned by two technicians and drawn down from a star ship like the Enterprise. She has herself teleported from the lab to the temple doorway, welcomes Fahimeh to "the Free City" and invites her to be her friend like all the other robotic, gray-robed figures standing in ranks in the courtyard. "Together we can build a new world," the Queen says. But the Persian maid knows it's a Zionist plot.

This is brilliant propaganda, brilliant in its role-reversals regarding target and aggressor and in regard to causes of behavior. If Muslims behave like robots ("you have taken away their ability to think," Fahimeh tells the queen, rebuffing her offer of friendship), it is not Israel's unilateral surrenders in the "peace process" that does it, except maybe to Western leftists. It sure doesn't take much thinking to see who's good and bad in "the land of wishes." Perhaps Iran has its own texts and media that deprive people of the ability to think, to act like anything other than robots.

The queen uses her techno-juice to materialize a virtual warrior (who resembles a young Benjamin Netanyahu) to compel Fahimeh's "friendship." But Kashki (and the appearance of her lost parents) hearten the maiden to envision her own warrior. Just when the evil white one seems winning, Kashki exclaims, "They can't control the fuel reactor of time! They don't have the code word!" The code is S-U-N, get it? The Jews are creatures of darkness. So is the Great Satan in the ship above them.

And who can control the fuel reactor of time, of the Apocalypse? The Mahdi, maybe …

Sure enough, the sad and victimized maiden draws on her inner strength and steadily the techno-supplied powers of the evil queen are exhausted, driving her to tears and literal crack-up. The Jew-created warrior is crushed into a pool of blood that burns with a glaring gold fire; the queen returns to her lab-throne and disintegrates. The technicians get zapped trying to save "the Medal," the Star of David that disappears into a pool of blood, then a flash and smoke as from a small nuclear bomb. Get it? The star ship blows up, too.

Now, that's thought control.

And the heroine accomplished all this from "a defensive posture." Robert Gates, too, described Iran's weapons program as deterrence of its enemies north, south, east and west. What we really need is more negotiations. The land of dreams mates the land of wishes: nightmares for everyone.

As Kashki said, "Don't be afraid! Create your own fighter! There's not much time till the reactor explodes!" Believe it.

Those targeted by Iran should consider themselves on notice, but their governments are controlled by hypnotists who crush the ability to think and the will to save ourselves with a stitch in time.

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Eugene Narrett is professor and director of the BA in Multidisciplinary Studies at Cambridge College in Massachusetts. He has written extensively on American politics and culture and on Israel and the Middle East. His books include "Gathered Against Jerusalem" (Writers Club Press), "Israel Awakened" (AuthorHouse) and "Israel and the Endtimes."