The Demagogue Neocons Love to Hate
Jim Lobe
"Let us state the obvious," wrote Reuel Marc Gerecht, the resident Gulf specialist at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute in the Weekly Standard's feature article Monday. "The new president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a godsend."
WASHINGTON, Jan 24 (IPS) - "Thank goodness for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," wrote Ilan Berman, the neo-conservative author of a hawkish new book, "Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States", in the National Review Online last week.
It's a sentiment that has been echoed in dozens of recent forums, publications and broadcast appearances out of Washington, and particularly in the two weeks since Tehran broke the seals put in place two years ago by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) at its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. Tehran had originally promised to freeze further research on the nuclear-fuel cycle pending the outcome of negotiations with the Britain, France, and Germany, the so-called EU-3.
"Ahmadinjad's inflamed rhetoric against America, Israel, and the Jews, which is in keeping with the style and substance of the president's former comrades in the praetorian Revolutionary Guard Corps, combined with the clerical regime's decision to restart uranium enrichment, has returned some sense of urgency to efforts to thwart Tehran," according to Gerecht.
Indeed, the Iranian president, with his public suggestions that Israel be "wiped off the face of the map" and that the Nazi Holocaust against European Jewry was a "myth", has prompted comparisons to Adolf Hitler himself, less than three years after Saddam Hussein was depicted as the Fuehrer's latest incarnation.
http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=31890