Iranian president: Israel must be destroyed

[tagryn]

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/10/27/ahmadinejad.reaction/index.html

(Iranian President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad's comments were made during a meeting with protesting students at Iran's Interior Ministry.

He quoted a remark from Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, that Israel "must be wiped out from the map of the world."

The president then said: "And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism," according to a quote published by Iran's state news outlet, the Islamic Republic News Agency.

The remarks by Ahmadinejad coincided with a month-long protest against Israel called "World Without Zionism" and with the approach of Jerusalem Day.

Unfortunately, statements like this aren't out of the norm for the ruling mullahs in Tehran. Anyone still think the Iranian government can be trusted with nukes?

Comments

[erikred.livejournal.com]

Absolutely not. However, let's put this in context: the government prior to this democratically elected nut was at least vaguely interested in something other than simple anti-Western rhetoric. In point of fact, there were noises toward reform. And in a wacky kind of way, the current nutjob himself was elected on a wave of reform politics.

All of which is to say, yeah, I know I said that Iran is not Iraq, but that was before the hostage-taking mastermind mayor got elected.

[tagryn]

AFAIK his main appeal was what what said about Mussolini: he makes the trains run on time. Specifically he appealed on a populist/anti-corruption note to Iranians who were fed up with not having the system work the way it was supposed to unless you knew someone high up in the ruling theocracy. He reportedly did a good job of addressing that as mayor of Tehran, and when things like the trash not getting picked up on time are happening, worrying about how he'll play on the international stage comes a distant second to voters.

Guys like Rafsanjani didn't worry me quite as much as Ahmadinejad does; there's a sense that R's price may have been extremely high, but at least he and his bunch had a price. Ahmadinejad and those in Qods Force are True Believers(tm.) in Islamic revolution; in the West, we'd say they've "drunk the Kool Aid". I fully believe Qods has been harbouring al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, among others. Letting these guys have nukes makes no more sense than giving them to, say, Eric Rudolph.

Which, on second glance, may be a much better analogy than one may think.

Anyway, I don't know if this can have a happy ending. Given Iran's well-known (and somewhat justified) paranoia about U.S. involvement in their affairs, we cannot directly assist any internal opposition groups - the second those links were discovered, that group would lose all credibility with the population. The EU's approach of more-carrot-than-stick hasn't worked. The Iranians haven't been as stupid as Saddam in concentrating his nuke facilities in one place, so knocking them down with airstrikes will be difficult & probably cause large civilian casualities.

I figure that if the Israelis haven't tried airstrikes anyway by the time Iran sets off its first bomb, its because they've quietly let Khamenei know that there's Israeli subs with nuclear warheads cruising in the Persian Gulf, ready to launch the second any missiles are detected crossing Iranian airspace. Ah, Mutually Assured Destruction, how we've missed you so!

If its the Qods' True Believers with their thumbs on the Iranian button, though, it may not seem like such a bad bargain to them.