amled,
Quote:
Astralis you once replied to me in another thread, that you had faith in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and to give him time, it appears that you still hold that viewpoint.
I wonder why?
Have not his words and deeds since given you pause for thought?
His declaration that Israel be expunged from the map of the world, his blatant anti-Semitism and denial of the Holocaust alone would be thought provoking. But taken together with, (admittedly as yet unproven) Iranian attempt to produce nuclear weapons should have produced some kind of doubt.
But there is also his wholehearted support of the recent crackdown on the dissent and reform within Iran.
All in all, not behaviour inductive to produce a great deal of trust.
|
you will have to show me where i said that. "had faith" in ahmadinejad? hardly. i think he's a tin-pot, socialist demagogue, and i have very little use for that ilk. i completely agree with you that his rhetoric, and his support for the crackdowns, make him untrustworthy.
having said that, however, actions speak louder than words. when push comes to shove, either in the form of foreign pressure, or domestic pressure from either above or below, a-jad folds. from his actions, we see that he follows by domestic political rules. while his talk on foreign policy is big and bad, i have heard this type of rhetoric before, both from past iranian leaders and countless other anti-US (and occasionally "pro-US", see the little thread where musharraf spoke in urdu in favor of the taliban after 9-11) tyrants.
in the end, though, these tyrants and tinpot dictators are interested in two things only: power, and saving their own skin. doesn't matter if they're theocratic or not...it's widely acknowledged in iran that the clerics and mullahs up top have been guilty of such a variety of sins that their religion would have them condemned to hell-fire eons ago.
but with that comes their own vulnerability: being rational makes them predictable. and being predictable means we can find a variety of solutions to minimize or getting rid of the problem altogether. writing off an enemy as simply "irrational" based upon his words alone, strikes me as being a tad intellectually lazy and indeed counterproductive in finding the best methods of counteracting the threat. the most convenient method is not always the best!
of course this is not to argue that we will find NO irrational leaders on the world stage. but those are few and far in-between, which of course makes it all the more important, when making the claim of irrationality, to examine this more closely.