LAST WEEK, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new president of Iran, declared that "Israel must be wiped off the map."
It was a truly "retro" moment, conjuring up images of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, who, almost four decades earlier, called on the Arab people to "throw Israel into the sea."
Now, as then, the international community gasped at the lack of civility but could not imagine that the leader who uttered these words was serious. Iran's diplomats were quick to explain it away, and even Ahmadinejad ultimately sought to tone down his words with less inflammatory rhetoric.
But the fact remains, as Ahmadinejad himself pointed out, that his comments were hardly new. In threatening the destruction of Israel, he noted he was only repeating the 27-year-long stance of the Iranian revolution.
There is one important difference between Nasser and Ahmadinejad: Nasser's Egypt was right next door to Israel. In fact, he issued his threat as he sent his army into the Sinai Peninsula and precipitated the 1967 Six-Day War. Ahmadinejad, by contrast, would have to send the Iranian army 1,000 miles across the Persian Gulf and the Arabian desert before he could hope to fulfill his threat.
It's true that Iran put a huge effort into developing long-range missiles with the ability to strike Israel. But so far, Iran can only load them with chemical warheads. To launch them against the powerful Israeli military would bring disproportionate death and destruction down on Ahmadinejad's own people.
So, does Israel really need to fear the populist ranting of an Iranian hothead president, who seems only to be using Israel as a whipping boy to stir up support for his already faltering government? Shouldn't Israel be satisfied that he scored an own-goal, further isolating Iran and placing its actions under greater international scrutiny?
The answer to my mind is clearly no. There is plenty of International Atomic Energy Agency evidence to indicate that Iran is bent on acquiring a nuclear weapons capability and that this goal is broadly supported by all of Iran's political factions. Four years ago, another Iranian leader, the supposedly moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, provided the strategic rationale for using nuclear weapons. He explained that in a nuclear exchange, Iran could withstand a second strike, whereas "the use of a nuclear bomb against Israel will leave nothing on the ground."
