http://www.thecommentator.com/article/889/will_we_have_the_guts_to_back_a_military_strike_on_iran_
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic revolution that, “In the coming days the world will witness Iran’s announcement of its very important and very major nuclear achievements.”
In dealing with fanatical, potentially genocidal, Islamist extremists (not a word you will now be allowed to hear from the BBC, we recently learned) it is always difficult to determine what counts as bluster and what counts as something we should truly be worried about.
So when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday – the 33rd anniversary of the Islamic revolution – that, “In the coming days the world will witness Iran’s announcement of its very important and very major nuclear achievements,” there will be some who will tell us not to be overly concerned.
Ahmadinejad was merely playing to the gallery, they will say. He simply delivered the kind of goading, aggressive rhetoric that would be appreciated by people who responded with chants of “Death to Israel”, and “Death to America”.
But as Larry Haas recently argued in these pages, one of the lessons the world should have learned from the 1930s is that when ideologically driven fanatics issue threats, we’d be well advised to take them at their word:
“Hitler ranted, but the world scoffed,” said Haas. “Few imagined that Hitler could be serious about his plans, even as the Third Reich increasingly institutionalized Jew hatred in law; later, few believed the reports emanating from Germany in the 1940s that Hitler was systematically slaughtering the Jews.
“Today, Iran’s leaders are pursuing nuclear weapons while threatening to wipe out Israel, referring to the Jewish state in the vilest terms. Most recently, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, endorsed a doctrine that explains why it’s “legally and morally justified” to eliminate Israel.”