Forum Post: War with Iran is sheer idiocy...

...but it's as much them as it is us. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is basically a theocratic quasi-dictator surrounded by a mix of mullahs and thugs who's busy rattling his saber at Israel to distract the populace from the manner in which he took power. Even if he isn't pushing for a nuclear weapon, at the very least he's posturing in such a manner as to indicate that he is so that he can be big and bad and try to drown out critics with testosterone-laced patriotism.

Why? Basically, the Arab Spring almost got underway in Iran two years early in 2009, when Ahmedinejad lost the presidential election to a moderate reformer named Mir Hussein Mousavi. Rather than accept the loss, he instead chose to rewrite the election results and declare himself the victor. The Iranian people were not happy with this, and they hit the streets in numbers reminiscent of the protests in Tahrir Square to complain. Unlike Mubarak, Ahmedinejad was able to crack down hard enough to drive Mousavi underground and hold power, but it left an incredibly bad taste in a lot of people's mouths.

At this point, Iran is splitting apart between old guard conservatives, and a younger, more cosmopolitan generation that's more inclined toward moderation and a certain degree of secularism (and that really doesn't bode well for Ahmedinejad). The fastest and easiest way he sees to resolve the split in his favor is to unite the people around a common enemy (that's pretty much universally true; just look how fast we all rallied around Bush II after 9/11) and to that end he's spoiling for a fight with Israel and the Western world in general.

Ahmedinejad wants the current standoff to blow up just as badly as Netanyahu does, and for roughly the same reasons (Netanyahu's not a dictator but he's hard-right and militant enough that even Meir Dagan, who spent nearly a decade running Mossad, considers him a belligerent idiot and wants Israel to stop needlessly antagonizing the rest of the Western world) and I don't see them backing off anytime soon. I also don't necessarily agree with appeasing Iran either, because in a situation like this I can't see Ahmedinejad stopping anytime soon (stopping would mean that he'd have to face Iran's internal issues and I can't see that working out well for him). At this point, all we can really do is hope that we don't wind up with a second Cuban missile crisis on our hands.