By PHK
The Bush Administration is not alone in forgetting that communications have become global and often instantaneous - and that messages designed for domestic consumption have a way of immediately entering the most politically sensitive international debate in real time.
Earlier today newly elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former student radical and supporter of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, inserted monstrous feet in oversized mouth – when he told a group of conservative Iranian students that “Israel must be wiped off the face of the map” and he did so in front of the cameras. The LA Times reported that Iranian state-run television quoted the president as saying “anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the first of the Islamic nation’s fury.” This kind of irresponsible rhetoric may have proven popular with Ahmadinejad’s religiously conservative and nationalistic Shiite audience, but it even went beyond former Iranian president Rafsanjani in 2001 when he “called for a Muslim state to annihilate Israel with a nuclear strike.”
Ahmadinejad’s ill-tempered words went down particularly badly in European capitals and even in Moscow - Iran’s Russian protector. European leaders - singly and hours later through the EU - condemned Ahmadinejad’s irresponsible language and called him to task. So did the Russians.
Whether Ahmadinejad will heed the warnings – which probably also came with some avuncular advice from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about cooling the incendiary rhetoric for Iran’s own survival – remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has taken an amazingly low key approach. The White House is quoted by the BBC and elsewhere as saying that “the comment showed the US was right to be concerned about Iran's nuclear programme.” Whether this unusually measured Bush Administration response to this latest Iranian provocation – a country which Bush labeled one of the four axes of evil a couple of years or more ago - 1) represents a new US approach to the complex Iranian nuclear issue by allowing the Europeans and Russians to take the lead in its resolution, 2) a quiet signal that the US is not planning to invade Iran anytime soon as neocon hawks like Michael Ledeen advocate, or 3) just that the Administration is so preoccupied with the Harriet Miers appointment/withdrawal embarrassment combined with potential indictments of at least one, if not more chief aides in the Plamegate affair is unclear.
Nevertheless, the Administration’s measured response thus far to Ahmadinejad's dim-witted words should allow some breathing room in an otherwise tense situation. That is, if the US still has any influence over Israel’s hawkish and unilateralist security policy whose leaders might very well choose to use Ahmadinejad’s "bring-em on" words as a pretext for taking out all of Iran’s fledgling nuclear installations regardless of their ill-explained intent.