Madam, - According to David Manning (May 12th), your columnist Charles Krauthammer is guilty of "blatant propaganda" in misrepresenting the Iranian president's remarks on Israel. Mr Manning quotes from a translation of President Ahmadinejad's October 2005 speech which appears to show its intention as one of mere regime change rather than destruction of the state of Israel. But the translation, by the Middle East Media Research Institute, of the speech as a whole shows clearly that the Krauthammer interpretation is the correct one.
The speech, delivered at a "World without Zionism" conference, is full of bellicose rhetoric from start to finish, and portrays Israel as the spearhead of the West in the Islamic world which must be eliminated: "This occupying country [ Israel] is in fact a front of the World of Arrogance in the heart of the Islamic world. They have in fact built a bastion from which they can expand their rule to the entire Islamic world
. . .Very soon, this stain of disgrace [ ie Israel] will vanish from the centre of the Islamic world - and this is attainable."
These are the words of a millenarian leader who believes in the imminent return of the Twelfth Imam following a world conflagration. Some of his other statements - that he was enveloped in a green aura while speaking at the UN General Assembly, and that his audience was so overawed that nobody blinked for 30 minutes - call his actual sanity into question.
But this matter involves more than the personality of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The suicide cult of radical Islamism in general renders a regime such as that in Teheran unamenable to the rational calculation of mutual destruction which kept the world safe from nuclear conflict during the cold war. As Mr Krauthammer shows in his quotation from ex-president Rafsanjani, it is quite easy to conceive of the Iranian leadership being willing to accept the destruction of some of its cities as the price of destroying tiny Israel with a single nuclear bomb.
Do we need any further reasons why, grim as the dangers may be, the military option must be held in reserve to ensure that the Iranian regime is never allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon? - Yours, etc,
DERMOT MELEADY, Dublin 3.