I saw a version of this story earlier but no other news outlets were covering it so I didn’t know if it was credible. But now Reuters has an article and I guess this really is a story.
Iran’s president said on Sunday the Lebanese and the Palestinians had pressed a “countdown button” to bring an end to Israel.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who triggered outrage in the West two years ago when he said Israel should be “wiped off the map”, has often referred to the destruction of the Jewish state but says Iran is not a threat.
“With God’s help, the countdown button for the destruction of the Zionist regime has been pushed by the hands of the children of Lebanon and Palestine,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech.
“By God’s will, we will witness the destruction of this regime in the near future,” he said. He did not elaborate.
Ahmadinejad elaborated later in the day.
“If you make a mistake and create another war against the oppressed Lebanese nation, this time the angry ocean of the nations of the region will remove your rotten … roots from the region,” the president said in another speech on Sunday night.
We must remember that Ahmadinejad is the President of Iran and he doesn’t have control over their armed forces, their intelligence agencies, or their foreign policy. But, nevertheless, his more or less constant bellicose and threatening remarks about Israel are a major concern.
Anytime any leader makes eliminationist comments about another people or nation we have to take it seriously. This white-hot rhetoric is extremely unhelpful for anyone that is opposing Dick Cheney’s desire to blow the crap out of Iran…damn the consequences. What, exactly, is Ahmadinejad trying to accomplish? Does he want his country turned to glass?
Israel has a psychological disposition of ‘never again’. Never again are they going to sit back and wait as powers grow around them aimed at their destruction. They will bomb Iran if this rhetoric keeps up. And they’ll leave us to clean up the mess…if we can.
We can look at the situation soberly and say that Iran can’t eliminate Israel without using a nuclear device, which they do not yet have. And we can note that any nuclear attack on Israel would bring retaliatory nuclear strikes. Deterrence should work. But it’s hard to sustain such an argument when the President of Iran is making these types of threats.
This concerns me greatly because we do not have the troops to change the government in Iran so, if we get in trouble, I can see us moving to a nuclear solution pretty fast. If Rice has won the right to pursue diplomacy with Iran, it can’t be long before Dick Cheney regains the upper hand. If Cheney can convince Bush that Iran is a mortal threat that they must not leave to a future administration (that may not have the requisite resolve) then we are all in big trouble. And Ahmadinejad is truly playing with fire when he taunts Israel and gives Cheney the talking points he so desperately wants.
