[San Francisco Chronicle] Victor Davis Hanson - Why would the Iranian government spend billions of dollars trying to develop a few first-generation nuclear bombs (as nearly everyone believes is the case) when the country is so poor that it has to ration gasoline? Most likely, Iran wishes to break Israel's will - not necessarily by a nuclear strike. Instead, periodic threats from a nuclear theocracy, it may recognize, would do well enough. Once armed with the bomb, Iran will likely increase the frequency of its now-familiar denial of the Holocaust. The net effect would be for half the world's Jews to hear constantly two messages - there was no Holocaust, but there might well be one soon. It would be analogous to the American public reliving the threats of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 - every day. The writer is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
2009-05-28 06:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive