The Trump Administration’s Iran Plan Is Even Crazier Than We Thought

A bonkers new report suggests that the U.S. and Israel attempted to install Holocaust-denying former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader.

In October 2005, days after Israeli forces killed a commander of the Hamas-aligned militant group Islamic Jihad in the West Bank, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke out unequivocally. “As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” said Iran’s newly elected president, referring to Ruhollah Khomeini, the late ayatollah and leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.”

It’s not hard to find quotes like this. During his two terms as president over eight years, Ahmadinejad said Israel has “no place in the region” and that “a devastating storm is on the way that will uproot the basis of Zionism.” The United States—whose president, George W. Bush, had listed Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” alongside Iraq and North Korea in 2002—was another frequent target. “The accomplishment of a world without America and Israel is both possible and feasible. And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism,” Ahmadinejad said, days after calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” Even if some of Ahmadinejad’s fury could be chalked up to anti-imperialist anger, he was also an unrepentant Holocaust denier who repeatedly referred to the deaths of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis as a “myth,” a “lie,” and the “opinion of just a few.”

Ahmadinejad was the face of an Iranian regime that Israeli hard-liners and neoconservatives in the Bush administration were determined to wipe out. In........

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