Bradley Burston weet het altijd scherp te stellen.
Klik hier voor een landkaart van Israël, met daaronder onder meer een kaartje van het Midden-Oosten. Daarop zie je ook hoe groot Iran is, en hoe klein het landje waardoor hij helemaal geobsedeerd schijnt te zijn...
Wouter
_________________
By Bradley Burston
The wager of the year goes something like this: A year from now, which is more likely to remain on the map of the world - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the state of Israel?
The call is no cinch, since:
The call is no cinch, since:
Perhaps most troubling of all, media reports have said that 50-60 tons of uranium, which if enriched to weapons grade level would be sufficient to produce five or six atom bombs, have gone missing from the Isfahan complex, which enriches raw uranium "yellow cake" into material that can be used for either nuclear power or atomic weapons.
Before you resolve to put your money on Mahmoud, however, you might note and factor in the following:
The Islamic Revolution of 1979 is increasingly showing its age. It is the nature of revolutions to turn pathetic as they gray. Yet they often surprise us when they do. Next year will mark three decades since Iran's Islamic Revolution and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power.
It bears consideration that it was the Soviet Union, not Ronald Reagan, that in the end toppled the Soviet Union. Iranians are not unaware of the freedoms and the prosperity of their brethren in the west.
It is true that failing revolutions often turn especially dangerous toward the end, and the bottom-line risk implied by a nuclear Iran is world war.
But if the Iranian people, pragmatic and perceptive as they are, can see their way past Ahmadinejad and the excesses of radical rule, a new Middle East could be the true result.
After all, this month marks the 30th anniversary of an impossibility, an event which at the time beggared all belief.
Israel's largest, most implacable and powerful foe, a Muslim nation which had threatened the Jewish state with annihilation and had sought to acquire nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, agreed in writing to a permanent state of peace.
There is no small irony, then, in the timing of Ahmadinejad's annual field trip to Manhattan this week, a spectacle which makes the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt seem all the more distant, and, sadly, all the more singular, all the more unrepeatable.
It may be said that it is the nature of aging revolutions to repeat themselves, first as tragedy, later as farce. The 10-year Iran-Iraq war was the tragedy, a million lives lost senselessly, needlessly, in what was called the The March to Jerusalem.
Herewith the farce:
This week, Ahmadinejad will headline a series of events in Manhattan, beginning with a Tuesday address to the UN General Assembly and a toast and ceremonial dinner from General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, the Los Angeles-born, Sandanista-raised friar of radical chic.
Two days later, in what may prove a perverse echo of his appearance at Columbia University exactly a year ago ["In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country."], Ahmadinejad is to take part in a Religions for Peace dialogue with church leaders. Perhaps, in full farce, he'll try his hand at comedy again, as he did at Columbia a year ago ["So let me just joke -- try to tell a joke here. I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs or are testing them, making them, politically, they are backward, retarded."]
Ahmadinejad may well be having the time of his life over all of this. He may be tickled 12 shades of pink over the Hillary Clinton-Sarah Palin debacle. He may believe he has Israel, the EU, Washington, the UN, even his Russian creditors, exactly where he wants them. Just a matter of time, he must be humming to himself, before the stinking corpse disappears.
For the record, though, I'd put my money on Israel.
In fact, as dark as these days certainly are for Israel and the west, if I were Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs, I'd begin to worry. Not so much about an aerial onslaught and the attendant World War III. I'd worry more about the society they've created. And about the cost-benefit analysis which ordinary Iranians are increasingly forced to draw. How Ahmadinejad has benefited the Iranian people by his exploitation of - and damage to - the Palestinian cause, by turning Iran into a pariah state, by his Holocaust denial and smirking disingenuous death threats to Israel, by the billions dumped in pursuit of the bomb, by a fortune wasted on funding suicide terror half a world away, by a fortune wasted on colonizing and arming south Lebanon and destabilizing the north.
This coming year, Iran will celebrate three decades of a terrible social experiment. The lessons learned may not be kind to Ahmadinejad, nor to radical Islam. Age and folly and the brutality of self-righteousness are beginning to catch up with both of them.
Never trust a revolution over 30.
It is true that failing revolutions often turn especially dangerous toward the end, and the bottom-line risk implied by a nuclear Iran is world war.
But if the Iranian people, pragmatic and perceptive as they are, can see their way past Ahmadinejad and the excesses of radical rule, a new Middle East could be the true result.
After all, this month marks the 30th anniversary of an impossibility, an event which at the time beggared all belief.
Israel's largest, most implacable and powerful foe, a Muslim nation which had threatened the Jewish state with annihilation and had sought to acquire nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, agreed in writing to a permanent state of peace.
There is no small irony, then, in the timing of Ahmadinejad's annual field trip to Manhattan this week, a spectacle which makes the 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt seem all the more distant, and, sadly, all the more singular, all the more unrepeatable.
It may be said that it is the nature of aging revolutions to repeat themselves, first as tragedy, later as farce. The 10-year Iran-Iraq war was the tragedy, a million lives lost senselessly, needlessly, in what was called the The March to Jerusalem.
Herewith the farce:
This week, Ahmadinejad will headline a series of events in Manhattan, beginning with a Tuesday address to the UN General Assembly and a toast and ceremonial dinner from General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, the Los Angeles-born, Sandanista-raised friar of radical chic.
Two days later, in what may prove a perverse echo of his appearance at Columbia University exactly a year ago ["In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country."], Ahmadinejad is to take part in a Religions for Peace dialogue with church leaders. Perhaps, in full farce, he'll try his hand at comedy again, as he did at Columbia a year ago ["So let me just joke -- try to tell a joke here. I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs or are testing them, making them, politically, they are backward, retarded."]
Ahmadinejad may well be having the time of his life over all of this. He may be tickled 12 shades of pink over the Hillary Clinton-Sarah Palin debacle. He may believe he has Israel, the EU, Washington, the UN, even his Russian creditors, exactly where he wants them. Just a matter of time, he must be humming to himself, before the stinking corpse disappears.
For the record, though, I'd put my money on Israel.
In fact, as dark as these days certainly are for Israel and the west, if I were Ahmadinejad and the ayatollahs, I'd begin to worry. Not so much about an aerial onslaught and the attendant World War III. I'd worry more about the society they've created. And about the cost-benefit analysis which ordinary Iranians are increasingly forced to draw. How Ahmadinejad has benefited the Iranian people by his exploitation of - and damage to - the Palestinian cause, by turning Iran into a pariah state, by his Holocaust denial and smirking disingenuous death threats to Israel, by the billions dumped in pursuit of the bomb, by a fortune wasted on funding suicide terror half a world away, by a fortune wasted on colonizing and arming south Lebanon and destabilizing the north.
This coming year, Iran will celebrate three decades of a terrible social experiment. The lessons learned may not be kind to Ahmadinejad, nor to radical Islam. Age and folly and the brutality of self-righteousness are beginning to catch up with both of them.
Never trust a revolution over 30.
