Everyone is awfully excited about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s latest threats to the West. The Iranian regime’s English-language stooge media outlet, Press TV, tells us that “Iran will deliver telling blow to global powers on Feb. 11.” Drudge carried the report in the headline for part of the day. It’s all over the news. I’m not sure why, and maybe I’m missing something. Seriously, Ahmadinejad says this all the time. On July 16 last year, he said, “as soon as the new government is established, with power and authority, ten times more than before, it will enter the global scene and will bring down the global arrogance.” On December 13, 2009, Ahmadinejad predicted that “the fall of the global arrogance and the Zionist regime will be quick and simultaneous.” On May 13, 2008, he said that “global arrogance established the Zionist regime … [which is] … a stinking corpse,” and in January 2007 he promised that “the United States and the Zionist regime of Israel will soon come to the end of their lives.”
A simple Google search will bring up a series of A’jad threats against the “global arrogance” and sundry other American aliases. Here’s the question: The Obama administration has tended to dismiss these sorts of rants as “saber-rattling and bluster,” cries for help, and assorted other psychobabble explanations. Suddenly, however, the administration has started pouring it on from all spigots: sending Patriot batteries to Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait, lengthening deployments to the Gulf, and otherwise talking up the stakes.
So what’s the deal? Is Iran a major threat to the United States and our allies? Did this suddenly dawn on the administration? And if Iran has suddenly become a major threat, when did they cross the threshold from target for engagement to major threat? Think it through: how do we want to sit down and politely discuss nuclear weapons over coffee one day and need to deploy missile shields the next? Why is Ahmadinejad a nut one day and a dangerous menace the next?
Hint: Something has changed. Second hint: It’s not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. About time too.