That's strange. If they don't want nukes because it could invite an attack, why do they continue to enrich uranium instead of accepting more-than-reasonable compromise offers from the UNSC?
Lat year around this time Iran was in talks with Turkey and Brazil to swap fuel rods. Turkey and Brazil would ship rods enriched for medical use to Iran and they would send the spent rods back to Turkey and Brazil. I think is interesting is that this a plan that the US had demanded of Iran, but because it didn't go through US channels they are now against it.
I would think Ahmadenijiad knows that if he tried to annex Iraq, the U.S. would be there to stop it.
I agree with that you're saying, but in reality the choice wouldn't be up to Ahmadinejad. What should be noted here is that the Persian culture has been around for such a long time that they collectively do not measure things in small increments of time. They have no qualms about waiting decades to achieve whatever goal they have in mind. In essence, there is no time table or window of opportunity that the Iranians feel they must act. They know that America cannot stay in Iraq forever and once we leave they will move.
It seems to me that they (America/Israel) know Iran is governed by whackjobs who openly support terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezboalla, are in bed with Syria, and gave material aid to insurgents in Iraq who killed our troops with it, among many other things.
The question we need to be asking is why does Iran support these groups? We have to be careful here because it is always too easy to write Iranian leaders off at whack jobs when we don't understand their rationale. It could very well be that it is us who in fact do not have a correct view of the situation. (<-- I think this is something we always have to keep in mind if we want to know the truth about anything.)
The next question that needs to be addressed is how Hezbollah and Hamas were formed to begin with. Hezbollah was created in the aftermath of Ariel Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The record is clear that the invasion was an attempt to establish a puppet government in Lebanon to expand Israeli control in the region. Hezbollah was created in response to Israeli aggression. Hamas is a very interesting story in my opinion. The Hamas of today was an unintended consequence of a short sighted Israeli strategy.
Since its creation, Israel has always had the ultimate goal of remaking the Middle East in to how it was under Ottoman rule. The reason is because they know that only a unified Arab population could pose any kind of legitimate threat. The architects of Israel understood that they were an alien entity in the Arab world and understood that it would be completely rational for Arabs to want to get rid of them. On a side note, the ideological inspiration for today's ruling party of Israel, the Likud, was Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky who authored "The Iron Wall." It explains the understanding that settlers had in the 1920's in which violence against the native population was the only way to realize the Jewish state. They were to build an iron wall between themselves and the Arabs in order to gain the strength necessary to one day be able to negotiate from the position of power.
Getting back to Hamas...
In the 1980's the PLO was gaining a lot of momentum and support among the Palestinian people. Israel chose to deal with this issue by invoking the divide and conquer strategy. They created the conditions necessary where a religiously motivated group could manifest. (I can go into more details upon request.) The idea was to create a religiously motivated Palestinian group to rival the secular PLO.
Israeli ambitions...
As stated before, the ultimate goal of Israel is expansion of its territory and influence. This must be understood for any actions they take in the region to make sense including in some situations inaction. For instance, a nation that has ambitions of territorial expansion would have sufficient motivation to sabotage peace agreements that would finalize its national borders which do not contain the desired territory. As stated previously also, they wish to remake the Middle East in the Ottoman model where they are in control. The rationale for this is that if the Arab world can be broken down into a mosaic of tribal regions and factions, there would be no chance for the necessary unity to develop that would threaten the Jewish state. In this model, Iran poses the largest hurddle because of its power to resist such efforts.
Iran's perspective...
Israel has expansionist ambitions in the region and if they were to succeed in the remaking of the Middle East, what would stop them from continuing on into Iran? Iran knows that Israel has an arsenal of nuclear weapons at their disposal and, when taking their regional ambitions into consideration, they don't want to provide a context where Israel can attack in a seemingly legitimate way. This is why I argue that they are not pursuing nuclear weapons. They would provide the perfect pretext Israel needs to launch an attack and rid the region of any potential competing powers.
Hamas and Hezbollah grew out of different circumstances and have different goals with their own grudges against Israel. Iran supplies them from time to time not because they agree with everything the groups stand for but for the sole purpose of having an insurance policy against possible Israeli aggression.
I agree, that translation is wrong. What he said was that the forces occupying Jerusalem should "vanish from the pages of time." Not a huge difference, but it does not specifically call for or threaten any military action, as the original translation suggests.
What needs to be pointed out here is that Ahmadinejad was actually quoting from a speech the Ayatollah Khomeini gave decades ago. The correct context of the quote was that the forces occupying Jerusalem were the same as any other regime in history in that eventually they will vanish from the pages of time. When put in the proper context, it actually is a huge difference in meaning.
Wheew... That was a lot of information... Sorry if was a little overload...