World War 3

President Bush, in a recent speech, said the following: "we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon"

The funny thing is that the leader of Iran never said he wants to destroy Israel. That was a mistranslation. Dr. Juan Cole, professor of History at the University of Michigan, made that point:

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)." 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.

To me the fact that the President of the United States would make such a provocative statement based on a mistranslation says that he is either an idiot or that he has a hard on for World War III. Knowing what we know about him it is likely that both are true.

The most ironic thing is that the United States is the country claiming the right to use nuclear weapons preemptively. We are also actively supporting nuclear proliferation through our latest deal with India. We must also never forget that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty allows them to develop nuclear energy for peaceful uses under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA has found no evidence of a program to develop nuclear weapons by Iran.

It is also interesting to note that Israel is widely known to possess nuclear weapons along with the means to deliver them. Israel in not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.