Washington ? Religious politics makes even stranger bedfellows than the ordinary kind.

Praising the Almighty for striking down Israel’s Ariel Sharon (or anyone else) expresses a particularly odious fanaticism. American evangelist Pat Robertson and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad both deserve condemnation for the warped sense of religion and the indecency each showed in attributing political motives to his own vengeful version of God.

Important differences separate these two opportunistic zealots. Robertson is primarily a danger to himself, a clownish performer who has stayed on stage far too long and is now self-destructing. More power to him in that endeavor, and may Robertson also help discredit the Israeli extremists who have bizarrely climbed under his ideological blankets.

Ahmadinejad on the other hand is rapidly becoming an ever clearer danger to global stability – intent on taking Jews and other infidels with him in a holy nuclear cloud on Judgment Day. This leader is not playing at being nuts. This leader is nuts, by every observable rational measure.

U.S. policymakers now take a meager solace from Ahmadinejad’s erratic behavior and pronouncements. Some see signs that he may soon plunge Iran into its equivalent of a Cultural Revolution. Mao’s top-down tumult absorbed China’s energies for a decade and more, and that nation emerged to swing hard away from policies of global insurrection and Marxism.

Ahmadinejad’s international miscalculations suggest that he may well be capable of such self-defeating behavior at home as well. The Iranians vindicated the Bush administration’s adroit shift to nonconfrontational diplomacy last week by alienating Europe, Russia and the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency in a single stroke.

The Iranians unilaterally ended international negotiations over the country’s reprocessing capabilities by breaking the IAEA’s seals at three Iranian nuclear facilities and resuming uranium enrichment. Western intelligence agencies believe that Iran is five to 10 years away from making a bomb, according to news reports.

That estimate may allow Washington space to follow a strategy of giving Ahmadinejad enough rope to hang himself: Denounce him, get the U.N. Security Council to hash over Iran’s nuclear perfidies, but avoid an all-out economic or military confrontation that would endanger European and Russian solidarity. And avoid steps that would enable the Iranian president to cement over the cracks that his radical moves and philosophy will create in Iran’s restive population.

This is probably the least risky strategy available to Washington in the short term. But it must be coupled with an understanding that the forces that drive Iran’s religious politics are much broader than Ahmadinejad and Iran’s more conservative ayatollahs, who by now must be regretting their role in having brought this firebrand to power.

Diplomacy, which is designed to take the blood lust and irrational behavior out of politics, is not likely to provide a lasting strategy for countering the politics of zealotry that the era of globalization has brought forth.

Religion has become a primary force of backlash against economic and political change in many parts of the world. The fact that Robertson, a leading figure in the religious right in this country, found himself cheek-by-rhetorical-jowl the other day with the Iranian rabble-rouser in calling for divine punishment for Sharon suggests that the United States is not exempt from such backlash.

Religion, at times a source of social advancement, today rushes in to fill the vacuum left in societies when traditional political institutions and authorities cannot explain, moderate or contain the identity-smashing changes of the global communications and technology revolutions. In these cases, religion becomes politics.

Reaction is what propels Robertson, the Shiite visionary Ahmadinejad, the Sunni Wahhabists of Saudi Arabia and countless other sects together in a broad historical sense.

They and their devout followers fight back in their own ways against the spreading vulgarization and secularization of societies that seem tempted to dispense with religion altogether. These are by and large counterrevolutionary movements, out of step with a secularizing march by history that many of them would destroy rather than accept.

That is why diplomacy’s ability to contain the Iranian zealots and their nuclear ambitions is likely to be limited in reach and duration. Americans – especially politicians, policymakers and journalists – need to put aside their constitutionally endowed reluctance to recognize and discuss the role that religion plays in politics and civic life at large.

It is not enough to say that religion and politics should not mix and leave it at that. As a nation, we need broad global strategies that explicitly take into account religion’s changing role around the world, and the great potential for harm as well as for good that those changes offer.