Ahmadinejad never "threatened to wipe Israel off the map"

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:43 AM on May 4, 2006.

Over in Peek, Evan highlighted an important post by Juan Cole -- a rebuttal of a drunken and libelous fit of dyspepsia by Christopher Hitchens.

Cole made two points that have to be amplified: 1) Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not have any power over the Iranian military establishment, and 2) he never threatened to wipe Israel off the map. I'll get to why these points are so important after the excerpt.

Cole:

I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having "threatened to wipe Israel off the map." I object to this translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that he wants to play Hitler to Israel's Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.

But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks. […]

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

Cole's clear in his enmity for Ahmadinejad and "everything he stands for." He's talking about the justification for attacking Iran, and just that.

As for the matter at issue, Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives. [emphasis added]

Moreover, Iran cannot fight Israel. It would be defeated in 72 hours, even if the US didn't come in, which it would (and rightly so if Israel were attacked). Iran is separated by several other countries from Israel. It has not attacked aggressively any other country militarily for over a century (can Americans say that of their own record?) It has only a weak, ineffective air force. So why worry about it?

What is really going on here is an old trick of the warmongers. Which is that you equate hurtful statements of your enemy with an actual military threat, and make a weak and vulnerable enemy look like a strong, menacing foe. Then no one can complain when you pounce on the enemy and reduce his country to flames and rubble.

It is obvious that powerful political forces in Washington are fishing for a pretext to launch a war on Iran, and that they are just delighted to have Ahmadinejad as cartoon villain and pretext.

Over on the front page Robert Parry has a good piece about how iffy the intelligence is on Iran's nuclear program and how far away from a bomb they probably are.

We need that, but it's not enough. I'll say it again: a debate about intelligence and crystal ball-gazing about if and when Iran will have nuclear weapons is un-winnable. It accepts the premise that we have the right -- indeed, the duty -- to launch an unprovoked attack on a country because it might, at some point, develop one one-thousandth of the nuclear capacity that we ourselves have. Once we accept those terms, we're cooked.

The narrative we're hearing is that deterrence -- the Mutually Assured Destruction that kept the U.S. and the USSR from blowing up the world for forty years -- won't work with Iran because a homicidal maniac with no regard for human life runs the country. He's happy to bring about the apocalypse, they say. 72 virgins in heaven and all that crap.

The nuclear mad-man story is important. Without that, the whole thing falls apart. You can forget about the moral and legal arguments against a unilateral attack; without the mushroom clouds the cost/benefit ratio is ridiculous -- we know that the consequences of attacking Iran would be incredibly serious; both the loss of blood -- on both sides -- and the economic impact would be huge.

And not just for the U.S. and Iran; deadly acts of terror all over the world tripled between 2003 and 2004.

Let's learn from how we got suckered into Iraq. We debated the WMD when we should have said, "yeah, Saddam probably has some nerve gas shells or something hidden in a bunker somewhere but he's an insignificant flea under our shoe -- a secular quasi-socialist who hates Bin Laden, has a puny, billion dollar military and doesn't remotely pose a threat to us."

Let's challenge the framing of the debate before it's too late.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.