Powerful women

A very great many are, and they — along with the world’s 1.5 billion other believers — may well take an attack on nuclear facilities as an attack. But for most their religious identity rests atop a national one, and that’s the identity that guarantees ferocious popular ire against Israel, or America, or any other nation with the capacity to bomb the place, however they feel about the government ruling it at the moment. In fact, as analysts such as Karim Sadjadpour tirelessly point out, a military attack likely would give the theocratic government an unprecedented mandate for power, fusing the regime to the defense of the nation with a fire the clerics can no longer produce on their own.