February 20, 2009

IBD Editorial, Feb. 20, 2009

Middle East: The global stage is set for a confrontation reminiscent of Churchill vs. Hitler and Reagan vs. Gorbachev. How long will Benjamin Netanyahu tolerate an Iranian nuclear threat before acting?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clearly wants to do something with the olive branch President Barack Obama has extended to him — even if what he does is stuff it into a Shahab-3 ballistic missile and fire it at somebody.

At a mega-rally for the 30th anniversary of the Islamist revolution, Ahmadinejad echoed the president’s phrase in regard to U.S.-Iran relations, “mutual respect,” and conceded that the Obama administration wanted “to produce change and pursue the course of dialogue.”

It is clear, Ahmadinejad added, that “the Iranian nation welcomes real changes.”

But whatever grand Barack/Mahmoud summits lie ahead may have just been dealt a pre-emptive strike, courtesy of the Israeli electorate.

Bibi Netanyahu, former prime minister and current Likud Party leader, has just been asked by President Shimon Peres to form a new coalition government after the close results in the recent Knesset elections.

His coalition will undeniably be fragile, depending on the support of one or a handful of the Jewish state’s tiny fringe parties. But Netanyahu used his first statement as prime minister-presumptive to send a powerful message to both Iran and the Obama administration.

To the shock of many, he pointedly refused even to mention the Palestinian peace process, which has been going nowhere of late. Nor was there, again clearly deliberately, any reference made to the so-called two-state solution, which those negotiations had been aiming to find.

Instead, the man who will soon once again lead the state of Israel spoke of “the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence” — Tehran’s Islamofascist regime, which for years now has been pursuing a uranium enrichment program it claims to be peaceful, but which even the United Nations diplomats who seek to appease Iran know to be an unprecedented danger to the free world. (Continue Reading this Article)