{"id":1257,"date":"2005-12-17T01:35:36","date_gmt":"2005-12-17T07:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=1257"},"modified":"2005-12-17T01:35:49","modified_gmt":"2005-12-17T07:35:49","slug":"iran-crashing-the-iraqi-election-high","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=1257","title":{"rendered":"Iran: Crashing the Iraqi Election High"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll leave it to Charles Krauthammer to provide the big come-down<\/a>, as he looks at the brewing danger in Iraq’s next-door neighboor, Iran.<\/p>\n

Lest you get carried away with today’s good news from Iraq, consider what’s happening next door in Iran. The wild pronouncements of the new Iranian president [previously discussed here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>], Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have gotten sporadic press ever since he called for Israel to be wiped off the map. He subsequently amended himself to say that Israel should simply be extirpated from the Middle East map and moved to some German or Austrian province. Perhaps near the site of an old extermination camp?<\/p>\n

Except that there were no such camps, indeed no Holocaust at all, says Ahmadinejad. Nothing but “myth,” a “legend” that was “fabricated … under the name ‘Massacre of the Jews.'”<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

To be sure, Holocaust denial and calls for Israel’s destruction are commonplace in the Middle East. They can be seen every day on Hezbollah TV, in Syrian media, in Egyptian editorials appearing in semiofficial newspapers. But none of these aspiring mass murderers are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons that could do in one afternoon what it took Hitler six years to do — destroy an entire Jewish civilization and extinguish 6 million souls.<\/p>\n

Everyone knows where Iran’s nuclear weapons will be aimed. Everyone knows they will be put on Shahab rockets that have been modified so they can now reach Israel. And everyone knows that if the button is ever pushed, it will be the end of Israel.<\/p>\n

But it gets worse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go read.<\/p>\n

Realize that, while the greatest dream of Iran’s rulers is the destruction of Israel and the United States, their greatest fear is neither the destruction of their nuclear capabilities by those same nations, nor is it the rather laughable speedbump that has been the European opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions to date; rather, that fear is the success of a free and democratic society, a society not dominated by Iranian dominion or a Saddam-like tyrant but a truly free society dictating its own future, sitting next door in Iraq. That is why the Iranian puzzle must be approached from two directions: stopping a madly-led society from weapons it seems quite willing to use, and providing those in Iran already thirsting for democracy an alternative to their current radical state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll leave it to Charles Krauthammer to provide the big come-down, as he looks at the brewing danger in Iraq’s next-door neighboor, Iran. Lest you get carried away with today’s good news from Iraq, consider what’s happening next door in Iran. The wild pronouncements of the new Iranian president [previously discussed here, here and here], […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-central-asia","category-middle-east","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}