This Time, Bashing Israel May Backfire

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called last month for Israel to be wiped off the map of the world, he displayed a disregard for the international community that proved he is a genuine disciple of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. But his proposal also showed that he hasn't learned any lessons from recent Iranian history. In a country where public opinion takes shape in direct opposition to the regime, the objects of hostile statements like Ahmadinejad's almost always win friends among young Iranians.

The debate over Iran's quest for nuclear weapons has produced thousands of headlines over the past couple of years, but anyone who's been following closely should know this much: There is no real news there. The issue has become a mere political symphony in which the same theme gets repeated over and over with only small variations. Yet it still gets significant coverage in the global media.

It may not have looked that way on the outside, but Friday's presidential election in Iran was historic. Not because it held out the promise of the kind of transformation that the 1997 elections, which heralded the reform era, once did. Nor because the candidates in the first round of voting were very inspiring -- the front-runner, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, failed to win a seat in the last parliamentary elections and has been accused by German prosecutors of approving the murder of Iranian opposition members at a Berlin restaurant in 1992.

(CBS) The year 1979 was a pivotal one in the history of Iran and that country's relationship with the United States. The shah had abdicated and was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini.