He's The Madman We Listen To!

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a press conference, so the whole Western world should stop what their doing and listen to what he had to say, right?

Um, why?

A year ago he claimed that Iran has successfully enriched uranium, without saying how much or whether it could even power a flashlight. Now he's coming back with more boasts, and the Western media follows happily along (although at least there's a little skepticism):

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said today that his country has started to produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale, and had reached the next phase of what he described as an irreversible program that his country had a right to pursue.

Some diplomats who follow the standoff between Iran and the West over its nuclear program wondered whether the claim might be at least partly a bluff.

OF COURSE it's a bluff, in the sense that he's making a claim, the impact of which is unknown. And all publicizing the bluff does is play into the hands of those in our government who have already decided on their desire for war, and are just hoping for a pretext. The Europeans get this:

Iran’s penchant for exaggerated public boasts about its atomic program made it difficult to assess the significance, if any, of today’s announcement. A European diplomat said the declaration seemed to have more to do with political showmanship than with technical breakthroughs.

But our homegrown neocons, who are desperate for an angle to allow them to put on their war helmets and lay maps on the floor and make attack plans, are lapping it up. Stanley Kurtz is breathlessly reporting estimates based on... well, the words of Ahmadinejad and scribbles on the back of an envelope. Gateway Pundit gets angry because Iranians are calling Americans names. Blue Crab Boulevard sees the Ahmadinejad statement as proof that, "While the West fiddles along, Iran is busy charging ahead with its nuclear weapons program." And here's some suggestive talk from Instapundit:

Everyone says that a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable, but they mostly seem inclined to tolerate it rather than actually do anything, and even mild suggestions about doing anything are treated as beyond the pale. The likely consequence of this squeamishness and sloth, of course, is that when things come to a head more people will die than if we took effective action now.

He doesn't explain what that effective action is, but you can figure it out. And there are enough posts and stories like this out there to pretty much know that the Republican establishment welcomes the rhetoric.

All of this fretting and belligerence is based on an Ahmadinejad press conference. Mind you, these are the same people who often say that Ahmadinejad cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons. We can't trust him in that sense, so... why are we trusting him now? There is no independent confirmation that Iran will be able to have a bomb in, say, a year. Not even the IAEA can determine if there is an active weapons program. The rest is noise. And the noise is coming from the Iranian President who is routinely derided as "an irrational madman." Except when he's talking about the precise details of uranium enrichment.

The British sailor crisis averted last week showed to me that the inner workings of Iranian government is incredibly complex and occasionally contradictory. Public statements from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bear little resemblance to official Iranian policy, and both the ruling mullahs and the President have their own motives. We cannot base our policy on celebratory government statements, any more than we should base the war on terror on every word that comes off Osama bin Laden's lips. We have unreliable narrators in Iran when it comes to their nuclear program. I know that the White House is willing to be duped by statements like this because they have a vested interest in finding a pretext for war. But Democrats shoudn't make the same mistake, and they should demand some independent confirmation from the intelligence community before believing anything coming out of Tehran.