Blogger Andrew Sullivan on Iran’s supposed suicide wish:
Jeffrey Goldberg provides a long list of the Islamist’s statements on Israel. It’s a good complement to this. Reading them all, it becomes quite clear to me that Ahmadinejad does indeed want Israel to cease to exist, but equally clear that he is not speaking of dropping a nuke on it. This one I hadn’t read before:
December, 2006: “I want to tell [Western counties] that just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and does not exist anymore, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out and humanity will be free.”
As we know, Russia now exists and the Soviet Union was not destroyed by nuclear arms. And if this is the process by which he hopes Israel will disappear, I see no reason to fear an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel (and on one of the most sacred sites in Islam). And since that is Netanyahu’s rationale for launching a war, it seems weaker to me now than it did before. It is also worth noting that one foreign minister in the Middle East has actually explicitly and unequivocally proposed bombing another country – Israel’s.