First of all, let me clear this up: Ahmadinejad is a fuckhead. He is anti-semite, he probably is a holocaust-deniar, etc. But that doesn't mean everything people claim about him is automatically right.
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Armads said: Rigging elections ( 10 million votes missing) |
There is still absolutely no evidence for this. In fact, the by far most reliable pre-election polling (and the only one carried out by a western institution, "a company whose work for ABC News and the BBC in the Middle East has received an Emmy award", quote Wikipedia) suggested that Ahmadinejad would win with even a few percent more.
This poll was carried out three weeks before the election however, so opinion could have changed. But after the election, with all the rigging accusations , the american polling agency "World Public Opinion" then did an even bigger post-election poll. All the results from this poll were extremely close to the official election numbers, and 83% of the respondents said they were confident that the declared election results were correct. This is quite interesting since the protests directly after the election should tend to cause people to doubt the official results.
What's true however is that Ahmadinejad is rather unpopular among young people and in the big cities. And that is where the protests actually happened, so the images seen on TV gave a very unrepresentative impression when it comes to Iran as a whole.
So the Iran election was not anything like the Afghanistan election a short time later, where there was absolutely clear evidence the election had been rigged in favor of the US-favored Hamid Karzai.
| Armads said: Creating nuclear weapons (evidence previously provided) |
There is still no evidence for this either. Just a few weeks there was a CIA report that claimed that Iran might be able to build a nuclear bomb within two years, but they had no evidence whatsoever that Iran is actually trying to build one. In fact, they didn't even have any evidence that Iran even wants to build the nuclear bomb.
But, to be honest, it is quite clear to me that Iran really wants to build the nuclear bomb. It's the only thing that could prevent Iran from being attacked by the USA or Israel. Even one of the leading israeli military strategists said that after the US-invasion of Iraq, Iran would be "crazy" not trying to build the bomb.
While I personally believe that Iran really wants to have the nuclear bomb, I consider a nuclear armed Iran a no bigger threat than any other nuclear armed country. There are US intelligence reports that estimate the chance of Iran attacking another country with nuclear weapons at about 1%. Unlike most other countries in the world, Iran has been a very peaceful country for far more than one hundred years. The real threat intelligence reports see when it comes to a nuclear armed Iran is the realistic chance of a nuclear retaliatory strike.
| Armads said: And here's a fun quote “As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” coming from a man who is attempting to (or already has) create nuclear weapons, this doesn't sound like playful banter to me. |
I would have thought that by now everyone had heard that this was nothing but a completely wrong translation. What he actually said had more to do with israel's occupation of palestine.
Btw., israeli prime minister Netanyahu on the other hand really uttered the threat of wiping Iran off the map - and this man really has nuclear bombs. Probably hundreds - nobody really knows, since Israel denies giving information about their nuclear arsenal.
