Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

I think I may have missed something important in my initial take on the assault and attempted kidnap  read more »

Hans Blix believes the Bush administration is courting catastrophe in its handling of Iran.  read more »

Whatever George W.  read more »

Hypocrite Pataki   To the Editor:    read more »

Hypocrite Pataki   To the Editor:    read more »

Hypocrite Pataki   To the Editor:    read more »

The flimsy philosophizing of Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and aspiring Presidential ca  read more »

The flimsy philosophizing of Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House and aspiring Presidential ca  read more »

Holocaust denial is a particularly insidious evil.  read more »

Holocaust denial is a particularly insidious evil.  read more »

I realize that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would probably disagree with me but, at the end of the day, there  read more »

On Tuesday, Sept.  read more »

George Ajjan has an amusing item on Why Iran's President Ahmadinejad never wears a tie. Ajjan heard this from an unnamed Iranian friend:

Shortly after the revolution...the tie itself began being associated with "Western imperialism", especially after Ayatollah Khomeini branded a large group of intellectuals (who were less religiously zealous than he would have liked) as "tie-wearing cronies of the West" and essentially branded anyone wearing a tie as being Western influenced... Gradually, as Khomeini's legacy became a bit less overbearing, regular people stopped caring... ordinary people now wore ties on a regular basis. I myself for example, always wore tie at work in Tehran, as did many of my colleagues. I would actually make a point of wearing a tie outside as much as possible, to do my bit...

B’esm’allah-o-rahman-o-rahim,” began the Iranian foreign minister.  read more »

B’esm’allah-o-rahman-o-rahim,” began the Iranian foreign minister.  read more »

Iranian President Ahmadinejad's remarkable letter to President Bush could (should!) revive a bleeding question surrounding the Iraq war: how many have died because of our invasion? Ahmadinejad put that figure at 100,000:

Because of the possibility of the existence of WMDs in one country, it is occupied, around 100,000 people killed, its water sources, agriculture and industry destroyed, close to 180,000 foreign troops put on the ground, sanctity of private homes of citizens broken, and the country pushed back perhaps 50 years.

Ahmadinejad's number is more than triple the American President's estimate of 30,000 dead, last December. Bush seemed to be reflecting the counter maintained by Iraq Body Count—now up to between 35-39,000. War supporters had at first been dismissive of these IBC estimates, The Washington Post reported, until the medical journal The Lancet came along in 2004 and said, on the basis of somewhat assiduous surveying, that the invasion had caused 100,000 deaths, making the IBC look conservative.

Ahmadinejad would seem to be echoing the Lancet's estimate from 2004. The American left also tends to use the 100,000 number, though lately on Informed Comment, Juan Cole's site, I have seen the number 200,000, as an extrapolation of the Lancet's two-year-old number. Here is an articulate poster, Terry, whose own website is Chomsky in Chains, making that assertion:

the 200,000 number is the best (and only) available estimate of excess deaths caused by the U.S. invasion. And it needs to be emphasized that the comparison is to Saddam. Call Saddam a monster and you implicate the U.S. Mass graves under Saddam? 200,000 more people are dead because of the U.S. invasion and occupation.

Here's hoping the American President answers the Iranian President's letter—and that the press corps asks the White House what its latest number is.

Some commenters have gathered on my Juan Cole post to slag Cole. I need to defend him.

One thing they're angry about is that Cole is being considered for a top job at Yale. They say that he doesn't have the publications to merit such an appointment. Wrong on 2 counts. Cole has a number of books to his name. And isn't it rather silly that people who use the internet to exchange ideas seem to regard the internet as chopped liver when it comes to serious scholarship? Cole's blog, Informed Comment, is itself an act of considerable scholarship. He is constantly reading, synthesizing, and supplying research to others. This is what scholars do. And why are these critics so worked up about Yale? It is the prestige issue. They don't want Cole to gain any more legitimacy for his ideas than he has. Michigan is already Arab-American-occupied territory. Well, guess what—if he goes to Yale, he'll probably have less time to do his very influential blog.

Something else that upsets them, Cole is trying to throw the brakes on Iran war-mongering by questioning the intelligence. Maybe we should listen, inasmuch as the last time we got war-drum intelligence about a foreign country in the Middle East we ended up occupying it disastrously. Specifically, Cole questions the translation of the statement in Persian by Iran's president Ahmadinejad that he aims to "wipe Israel off the map." He says Ahmadinejad actually quoted Khomeini: "This occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

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.

Ahmadinejad''s comments about Israel are frightening; I agree. How should we react? For me, the larger issue is, To what extent will our foreign policy respond to Israel's interests? From hatred of the U.N., to the invasion of Iraq, to the demonization of European opinion, to the portrayal of Arabs as uncivilized, to the refusal to engage Syria as a possible partner in helping us out of the Iraq mess—again and again the neocons and fellow travelers have identified our interests and Israel's as congruent. The fellow travelers are often liberals. Like Paul Berman, who in his book Terror and Liberalism, endorsed the Iraq war in large measure because of suicide attacks in Israel. Or Tom Friedman, saying on Slate: that the only way to counter suicide bombers, at the WTC and in Israel, "was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something."

That kind of hysterical thinking has helped produce great suffering, and waves of further hysteria. At least Cole is trying to figure out what the other side is saying.

Ariel Sharon pauses at the gate of life and death.  read more »

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the newly elected president of Iran, arrived in New York last Tuesday  read more »

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the newly elected president of Iran, arrived in New York last Tuesday  read more »

A few weeks ago, Iranians living in the U.S.-or at least those known to the regime in Tehran-began r  read more »

A  read more »