Nothing suprising in Wikileaks

Very little overall seems all that surprising in the recent leaks, except perhaps for some people. Ahmadinejad is convinced the whole thing is a conspiracy. I wonder what Mearsheimer and Walt think, given how much they have invested in the notion that it's American Jews pushing us to war.

Ahmadinejad in Lebanon

With Ahmadinejad recently in Lebanon, I thought I'd check Juan Cole so that I could understand exactly how Ahmadinejad was being misrepresented. In comments, Yaakov Lozowick asks Cole:

Prof. Cole,

Any comment on Ahmadinejad’s explicit call for the destruction of Israel? In the past you’ve suggested he doesn’t really say such things; this time it seems a bit hard to deny, don’t you think?

Cole responds:

Hi, Yaacov. What I said was that Ahmadinejad hasn’t threatened to kill any Israelis, roll tanks against Israel, etc., which the invented mistranslation ‘wipe Israel off the map’ implies. He does want a collapse of what he calls the Zionist regime, on the analogy (for him) of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and some odd form of the one-state solution. But he also says that if the Palestinians accept a two-state solution, he will too.

According to the Washington Post, what Ahmadinejad said was

Today the Zionist occupiers have no choice but to surrender to reality and return to their homes and countries of origin.

That would indeed be a particularly odd form of one-state solution.