Just what lesson did Iran learn?

Tigerhawk links to a yahoo news article about Iran's ceremonies marking the start of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.

The news articles says:

"We have always said we want friendly relations with other countries," said President Mamhoud Ahmadinejad, addressing his first military parade since taking office last month.

"(But) those who decide to misuse our nation's honor and dignity and want to test what has been tested in the past, should know that the flames of the nation's wrath are very hot and destructive," he added.

Ahmadinejad said Iran's enemies had learned a lesson from the eight-year war during which Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill and hundreds of thousands were killed.

"Iran's enemies understood that the nation is very serious in defending the country's security, integrity, and the achievements of the (1979 Islamic) revolution," he said.

What lesson did Iran learn from that bloody war with Iraq? They learned the value of having a hammer ten times bigger than your opponent, so that your opponent will think twice about attacking you. Iran wants nuclear weapons to have some weight to throw around.

Tigerhawk says:

Iran's president, Mamhoud Ahmadinejad, said today that Iran "[has] always said we want friendly relations with other countries." But how can he square this with "Israel should be wiped off the map" and tramping America "under our feet"? He can't, and we can't. As he was speaking his own military was showing him to be a liar.

Neither the press nor Western diplomats seem to have pointed out Mamhoud Ahmadinejad's barefaced lie. Neither the press nor the West say anything because they think of these guys as line-drawing leaders of a cartoon country, and they do not want to strengthen the American case for confronting Iran. Indeed, under current circumstances, even the United States may not want to strengthen that case for fear of boxing itself in to another showdown with no support from the Europeans. The result is that the Iranian head of state can flap his gums all day long about Iran's desire for "friendly relations" and why one of the most energy-rich countries on earth needs peaceful nuclear power and nobody even raises an eyebrow when his own military -- not some alleged student demonstrators but the Iranian army -- calls for the destruction of two countries that Iran attacked first (the United States Embassy in 1979 and Israel via Hezbollah).

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