Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s letter to President Bush was effectively a declaration of war, according to the New York Sun and many around the blogosphere. The nub of this theory is that the letter was a formal “call to Islam,” and that this is a necessary precusor to an attack on infidels, traceable back to Mohammed in the Hadith.

The various and repeated references in the letter to “monotheism” and the apparently benign references to Jesus (PBUH) as a prophet and a messenger of God seem to serve a dual purpose — giving room for some to believe that the overall message is “live and let live; we all believe the same basic things,” while in actuality making Ahmadinejad’s point that Islam is the one true religion and that Bush and everyone else should face up to this and convert. Ahmadinejad is fine with labeling Jesus as a prophet or a teacher. Meanwhile, he knows, of-course, that Christians believe that Jesus actually is God, and to call him a prophet or merely a messenger of God is to explicitly reject that. For Islam, the whole “three persons in one God” thing is a little bit too nuanced — it amounts to polytheism, and it seems safe to assume that Ahmadinejad views it this way. So by repeatedly bring up both the concepts of monotheism and Jesus-as-prophet, Ahmadinejad, in the most subtle way he knows how, is telling Bush, “You’ve got it wrong. Come to Islam and learn the right way.”

And if there were any doubt, yesterday in Jarkarta Ahmadinejad reportedly confirmed that the letter was indeed a call to Islam. And just to make things even more interesting, today traces of uranium enriched to “close to or beyond weapons grade” have reportedly been detected by the U.N. atomic agency at a site linked to their defense ministry.

I commented previously in this space that it seems like there’s something important that we don’t know in this entire scenario with Iran, and I see no reason to revise my point of view. Ahmadinejad’s braggadocious stylings are running counter to Iran’s interests, one would think. Assuming that their aim is to develop nuclear weapons, which everyone with any brain does assume, they could buy themselves more time by appearing more conciliatory and by being more deceptive and thereby dividing international opposition even more than it is already divided. That behavior would certainly make sense if they were, as “experts” speculate, five or ten years away from developing a bomb. Instead, Ahmadinejad daily makes comments about destroying Israel, or the death of western liberalism — comments which must make it exceedingly difficult for his erstwhile allies on the UN Security Council to continue making the case for restraint. And Ahmadinejad is not being “reined in” by the Ayatollah, as some speculated he would be when he began his presidency and first started breaking dishes.

Well, whatever it is that we don’t know, we can be confident that history will tell the tale, no doubt.

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