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Claim:
Iran has vowed to annihilate Israel.
Response:
This myth derives from a remark made by Ahmadinejad nearly four years ago, quoting a comment by Ayatollah Khomeini decades before that: "This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be wiped off/eliminated from the pages of history/our times."
Ahmadinejad has made other offensive and threatening remarks about Israel and other nations -- most notably his indefensible denial of the Holocaust.
However, the Supreme Leader Khamenei promptly "clarified" that "[the Islamic Republic] will not commit aggression towards any nations; we will not breach any nation's rights anywhere in the world" and specifically that Iran will not attack Israel unless Iran is attacked first.1
Ahmadinejad himself later explained, or was forced to explain, that he had been referring to regime change through demographics (giving the Palestinians a vote in a unitary state), not war.
Whatever Ahmadinejad may have been thinking at the time, his remark has not materially altered Iran's long-standing policy, which has remained the same for decades: deny the legitimacy of Israel; arm and aid groups opposing Israel in Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank; but promise to accept any deal with Israel that the Palestinians accept.
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Claim:
Iran is an existential threat to Israel
Response:
Not so, according to Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, who recently declared, "I am not among those who believe Iran is an existential issue for Israel. . . . Israel is strong, I don't see anyone who could pose an existential threat," although he did add that he viewed Iran as a challenge to the whole world. 1 Israel's military capability dwarfs Iran's by land, air and sea. The history of Iran's foreign policy shows a country and a regime bent on survival, like all other countries that have land and population to protect. In fact, the best and probably only way to make Iran an existential threat to Israel is for Israel to attack Iran.
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Claim:
Bombing works. Bombing the Osirak reactor stopped Saddam Hussein's nuclear program.
Response:
Contrary to popular myth, the Israeli bombing of Saddam Hussein's Osiraq reactor in 1981 did not stop Iraq's nuclear weapons program. In fact, it may well have started or greatly expanded it, according to Iraqi nuclear scientists who have written on that episode. Iraqi nuclear scientist Imad Khadduri claims that the Osirak reactor was designed by the French to be poorly suited for plutonium production. Moreover, bombing the reactor did not stop Saddam Hussein's A-bomb program as often believed. On the contrary, it convinced the Iraqi leadership to initiate a full fledged nuclear weapons program immediately afterwards -- and to do so covertly and on a large scale. 1
Khadduri's account is independently corroborated by another Iraqi nuclear scientist, Khidir Hamza, who would become a leading supporter of the Iraqi invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. He reports that the Israeli raid on Osirak had the effect of transforming what had been a relatively modest operation involving 400 scientists funded at $700 million a year -- with a capability for generating enough plutonium for less than one bomb a year -- into a large, covert enterprise involving over 7,000 scientists and technicians with a $10 billion investment dedicated to developing the underground capacity to enrich enough uranium for six nuclear bombs a year. 2It was not the Osirak raid that stopped Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, but Operation Desert Storm (ten years later) and the inspection regime that followed that finally prompted Saddam Hussein to terminate the program.
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