Jack Ross says I'm too hard on Ahmadinejad. I don't know what to say; Ross is 23 and so much better read than I am that my jaw simply drops. Another jaw-dropper:
Insofar as you're correct to point out that he's really calling for
binationalism, you miss the point about his holocaust rhetoric. He
knows exactly what he's doing, pushing the buttons of the Americans to
get what he wants. In the past I've said the person in history he's
most comparable to is FDR, trying to provoke us into attacking Iran just as FDR did all he could to provoke Japan.
Failing that, he will still be pleased as punch to have a humiliated
America, in the person of Obama, come to Iran begging them to clean up
our mess in both Iraq and Afghanistan, which is exactly what's going to happen.
As I've said repeatedly before, this is the back door to peace and justice in Israel/Palestine. Ahmadinejad may also be thinking of the Congress of Vienna: already, Osama bin Laden
is going to go down in history as the greatest military genius since
Napoleon, having brought down both the Soviet and American empires.
And like Napoleon, the consequence of his actions will be the vital
strengthening of all the forces to which he is opposed – in Napoleon's
case, the old order, and in bin Laden's, the Shiites. In all these maneuvers, remember that in Iran we are dealing with the civilization that invented both chess and backgammon.
P.S. Also
wanted to make a point about Moment, which is a very silly magazine you
should take with a grain of salt. The article to which you referred
was a completely unsubtle version of the charade carried on by The New Republic for over a generation with much more finesse: that we right-wing Zionists are liberals because we support abortion on demand and gay marriage.
