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Doctor Strangelove? La bombe et le Coran, une biographie du president iranien Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [The Bomb and the Koran, a Biography of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] by Michel Taubman, Editions du Moment, 2008, 255 pp. [French]
Reviewed by Michelle Mazel
His face has graced the cover of the world's leading magazines. His name may be nearly unpronounceable but is nevertheless a household word. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been compared by his admirers to Saladin who defeated the Crusaders, and by some of his detractors to Hitler. Others say he is just plain mad. He told Angela Merkel that the Holocaust had been invented after the war by the Allies to embarrass Germany. He routinely declares that the destruction of Israel is the key to solving the Middle East crisis and has been known to call explicitly for wiping that country off the map.
Ahmadinejad is also quoted as saying that the end of the United States is near. There is a very real possibility that he might one day soon have nuclear weapons at his disposal. He is known to be a devout Muslim, a mystic who believes he has been called upon to hasten the coming of the Mahdi, the vanished Imam of the Shiite whose return will usher in a new era of world peace and harmony under the rule of Islam. If it takes a nuclear war to destroy the US and Israel and bring about this coming, will Ahmadinejad deem the price was right? The fate of the world may well hinge on the answer to that question. But what do we really know about Ahmadinejad, the man who has presided over the destiny of Iran since 2005?
Michel Taubman, a French political scientist and editor of the Meilleur des mondes [Best of all Worlds] quarterly decided to investigate, because he believes the fate of the world may well hinge on the behavior of a little known man catapulted from obscurity by his surprise election to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 2005. Taubman discovered that the past of Ahmadinejad is shrouded in mystery. He may have been born on 28 October 1956, as...