Ahmadinejad awaits a response [View All]

2006-04-16 Does reasonable mean impotent?

Haatetz. Zvi Bar'el. Ahmadinejad awaits a response
Ahmadinejad provocatively demands that the world's nuclear community welcome Iran to the club - or go to war against it. Thus, the Iranian president pulled himself out of the entanglement of dilemmas and placed it in the hands of the "world" - namely, the United States.
The military option may be very exciting; and in some places, there are already people stroking the buttons that launch the ICBMs - but Ahmadinejad can relax. A military assault on Iran, they worry in Washington, could instigate an Iranian double-pronged attack on Iraq - one, a missile attack against military targets, and the other, an attack by activists - terrorists or political agents - aimed at turning Iraq into adjunct Iranian territory. An attack on Iran would unite the Iranian people, including those opposed to the ayatollahs, and thus even further strengthen their regime; and the vision of regime change there would evaporate.
An attack would also portray Iran as the victim, trampled by the United States - and it's a very short hop from there to Arab solidarity with Iran, a Russian embrace, as is conventional, and the intensification of anti-U.S. sentiments not only in the Middle East. And all this even before it becomes clear which targets should be attacked and if Western intelligence is familiar with all the targets.
...if Iran is an insane state, what's the point of sanctions? However it is not semantic logic that will decide, but rather the understanding that there is nobody right now who can attack Iran, and provide reasonable solutions to the dilemmas that such an attack would awaken.