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.
Um, he knows that Bush has no Congressional support for more war and that unless he actually kills someone, he can say whatever the heck he wants and we can’t stop him.
Each country’s crazies are trying to goad the others into pulling the trigger first.
USuk is now accelerating its propaganda efforts for a wider war including attacks on Iran. The media is working overtime on this.
Reuters is not immune. The Brits really are in the Bush camp.
If you speak or read Farsi, then I suppose you know what Ahmadinejad said. Otherwise not.
One thing is true: Iran is not a threat to Israel in any direct way. The Iranians have no credible way to attack Israel if they wanted to.
(Exhorting Palestinians and Lebanese to resist dispossession and genocide by Israel–which they are alreay doing–hardly counts as a strategic attack or threat.)
The whole nuclear-proliferation debate is bogus. Iran is not seeking uranium enrichment for weapons production, because that is not how you run a bomb project. You do plutonium production–cheaper and faster–which no one is claiming the Iranians are doing.
Oh yes: Israel already has an extensive nuclear arsenal. Really Iran is no threat on this score. It is just bogus.
The whole story is just feed for the sheeple. Nothing to get excited about–except for what it implies about AMERICAN war plans. The US has been seeking, but failing, to launch its pre-emptive nuclear war for about two years now. The reasons for delay remain hidden. There seems to be some interior political struggle over whether global nuclear war is really a good idea.
Yeah- wasnt there a flap a while back about the “wipe Israel off the map” remark – it turned out to be an inaccurate, overly-inflammatory translation.
When you read “Ahmadinejad is reported to have said …”, you would do well to determine who is doing the reporting.
Ahmadinejad, to my knowledge, has never promoted the elimination of Jews. He has talked about an end to the “Zionist regime” in Israel that many say is the same thing though. Keeping that in mind, here’s a link to a report from an Iranian source.
thank you for that link….gee that makes Ahmadinejad sound like a reasonable person…can’t have that now can we when reporting on him here.
Oh, that makes it fair.
Ahmadinejad is a politician, nothing more and nothing less. So if nothing else, whose puppet is he. The answer is pretty obvious.
I’ve seen on MSM that the Iranian people love the Americans. That might be true for some. However, the problem is the same there, as it is here. The people of peace aren’t in control.
My guess is that Ahmadinejad doesn’t say shit these days without having it vetted by someone in charge. Ergo, either the ayatollahs are looking for a confrontation or they don’t think the US will take the bait.
If it’s the former, then the Iranians expect that their state-of-the-art missile arsenal will be able to make short work of the outdated US Navy, increasingly much of which is parked in the Persian Gulf. Based on what is known about the latest Russian and Chinese ASMs, that might well be the case. It may be, then, that Ahmadinejad is spouting off in hopes that we will move whatever ships we haven’t moved into the Gulf yet into range of Iranian missiles. Then there’s Iran’s ability to provoke a general uprising in Iraq.
If the latter, they are operating under the assumption that the Bush administration has been effectively neutered by opposition within the Department of Defense. That might be the case, too.
I agree about the ayatollahs. I also agree about moving the ships in closer and then a confrontation. Just a chess move. The people in charge might be stupid enough to do that, but I don’t the the generals would.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the military more ready to revolt then I have now.
Of course the irony is, that our own psycho president now has so little credibility….around zero…..that even if this WERE true….even if this WAS little more than the usual propaganda….
nobody would believe him anyway. I’ve noticed that on all the blogs. No one believes a thing he says any more. He and Cheney are both our Baghdad Bobs. The Bob-sey twins. Blah blah blah….last throes….bring ’em on. We’ve heard it all.
That’s what you get when you lie constantly to your own people.
I’d say he has cried Wolf(owitz) a few times too often.
They are so alike.
So each time a leader “makes eliminationist comments about another people or nation we have to take it seriously”??
FANTASTIC.
Lets start by “taking seriously” the comments by the people who ACTUALLY HAVE NUCLEAR BOMBS OK?
FROM: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist Sept-Oct 2006
So, who is the crazy nut that is a threat to the world?
http://ahmadinejadquotes.blogspot.com/
I was told by BlueGirlRedState (Global Citizen ) that her son speaks Persian ( her husband was posted in that area for several years – USAF ) and attributions being made to him were b.s. when he watched him talk on TV. When Germans made the same comments, I thought I’d grab some past examples of his speeches just for contrast-and-compare purposes – knowing fearless leader and the press would never mislead us.
Whoops. That was from the previous time disinformation was in the works. I just expected more of the same before something especially unprovoked and stupid was engaged upon. Yes I do keep Global Research.ca on the Blogroll.
The example Ahmadinejad most often cites about a regime being wiped off the map is the Soviet Union. Think about that. No nuclear weapons were used. No annihilation of Russians.
Gee, Booman. I am more than a little disappointed that you have fallen for this “Iran president threatens to wipe out entire people” bit. I would have thought you would be aware of the controversy over the translation of his alleged “wipe off the map” remark, of the efforts to show that he has never said anything of the sort nor has he repeatedly threatened physical destruction of Israel or anyone else. Predicting, calling for the end of an era, the end of a regime, yes — sort of like calling for the Republicans to be tossed out, not like threatening to kill all Republicans. I am surprised that you seem ignorant of the despair over the constant, propagandistic reuse of these distorted comments (by Reuters in this case and now you, of all people). Juan Cole, among others, has gone into this at length (and you are even listed in his blogger’s section). See Jonathan Steele in the Guardian at http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_steele/2006/06/post_155.html. Also Virgina Tilley in Counterpunch http://www.counterpunch.org/tilley08282006.html.
How is it that you have this blind spot?
There’s no mystery to why Booman has fallen for the “Evil Iranian President” schtick:
“These regular mailings from the Israel Project to ‘opinion agents’ such as yours truly are, in effect, a public relations campaign for war. The monthly missives I receive from this one pro-Israel lobby are a small part of a broader effort to “secure the information stream” and prep Americans for the next exotic stop in the war on terror: sunny Iran. …
Let me light a lantern in a bell tower for my fellow Americans. You must awake. There are PR armies of the night with shiny media kits and Dick-Cheneyfied ‘intelligence’ reports quietly at work right now, building momentum for a strike on Iran and a vast broadening of this too costly–and let’s just say it–too crazy war on terror.”
US Catholic June 2007
http://uscatholic.claretians.org