Feb. 13, 2006 issue - Twenty years ago, when they were slaughtering each other in one of the bloodiest wars of recent times, you'd hear mordant jokes about not being able to tell the difference between Iran and Iraq. Today, it's hardly a laughing matter. After 9/11, the Bush administration calculated that Baghdad posed the greater danger, and launched a war that so far has cost $251 billion and the lives of more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers. But now it's starting to look like Iran may have been the bigger threat all along. Well on its way to having the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons, Tehran is now thumbing its nose at the international community's attempts to stop it. Meeting with Babak Dehghanpisheh and other reporters recently, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad casually cracked jokes while talking about the nuclear showdown. And on the streets of Tehran, Babak reports, shopkeepers, students and cabbies braced for a long siege of economic sanctions-or worse.
So what should America make of Ahmadinejad, the former student radical who has called for the destruction of Israel, denied the Holocaust and mocked "false superpowers"? By Babak and Christopher Dickey's account, he is mostly a figurehead in a theocracy run by heirs of Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet he can hardly be dismissed: his defiance reflects a deep strain of Iranian nationalism and nostalgia for Khomeini's righteousness. As Kevin Peraino reports from Jerusalem, Iran's march toward becoming a nuclear power is real enough to have sent Israel looking at new options for pre-emptive strikes. And with Islamic radicals gaining ground in elections from Gaza to Egypt, Fareed Zakaria argues that President Bush is wrong to think that democracy alone will bring freedom to the Middle East without U.S. policies that bolster moderates and promote civil liberties.
From newspapers to movies to cable and satellite TV, Rupert Murdoch has long been at the forefront of media innovation. Now that he is taking on the Internet with his purchase of MySpace.com, he sits down with Johnnie L. Roberts for a fascinating talk about his next agenda. (I won't spoil the scoops, but anyone who works at or invests in CNBC, Google, Yahoo, Viacom or Time Warner should read it.) And reporting from behind the scenes of Stephen Colbert's "Colbert Report," Marc Peyser analyzes why the new star of fake news has us both laughing and talking seriously about why "truthiness" is now more powerful than truth.
