What Comes After the Cartoon Riots?

Are the Muslim cartoon riots more dangerous than we think? Are they an early volley in a global clash of civilizations (with the West trying to deny it until it's too late)? Globe-trotting correspondent (and my esteemed former boss) Arnaud de Borchgrave proposes this chilling scenario:

"The cartoon war could be seen as a limbering exercise for a global intifada. It would be a miracle if the Wahhabi and Salafi and Deobandi and Shiite clergy leaders didn't see it the same way. Iran's Ahmadinejad, surveying the global cartoon thunderclaps, must have concluded that the return of the 12th Imam, known as the Mahdi, is drawing nearer, which means world chaos, death, and destruction, before a new era of world peace under Islamic rule."

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy also sees the cartoon riots as prelude to something bigger, created for the larger purpose:

"So what made this demented scene, this planetary upheaval, possible? However you might look at the problem, it is hard not to see that insidious forces have brought these drawings to the attention of the Muslim masses. And it is hard not to link this provocation, the deliberate circulation of these cartoons, the quasi-home-delivery of a Danish paper that no one could have guessed had so many readers in the Muslim world, it is hard not to link this self-inflicted blasphemy, this calculated offense (calculated, mind you, by the organizers of the distribution of the cartoons), it is hard not to link this blasphemy to a new planetary configuration, itself determined by three recent and major events."

The three events: diversionary tactics of Syria, eager to reassert itself as regional agitator; the hardening of Iran; and the electoral victory in Palestine of Hamas. "These three events," Lévy continues, "are linked as a triangle. There is between these three poles a veritable triangle of death, which is in the process of locking into place thanks to the cartoons affair--and which, if it is successfully welded together, will produce not just symbolic heat, but, with an Iranian bomb, a fissile heat unlike anything we saw in the good old axis of evil."

Lévy suggests that we reach out to "enlightened moderate Muslims"--an excellent idea, along with waking up to the danger we face.