The people of Aradan, a flyblown town south of Tehran where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born, never expected him to become president of Iran. They believed he would stick to his chosen profession. If only he had. The world is looking into the abyss, thanks to a man with a PhD in traffic management.

Ahmadinejad’s combustive rhetoric about wiping out Israel, denying the Holocaust and asserting Iran’s inalienable right to nuclear power — a potential cloak for developing nuclear weapons — have triggered alarm bells around the world.

As this paper revealed last weekend, Ariel Sharon, the prime minister of Israel, has ordered his armed forces to prepare for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran by the end of March, after which the country will have the technical expertise to build a nuclear warhead in two to four years.

The international storm of outrage that greeted Ahmadinejad’s comments is quite an achievement for the 49-year-old radical, whose meteoric trajectory from obscurity to become mayor of Tehran culminated in his taking office as president in August.

“He’s a tiny, wiry figure with a gaunt face and small black eyes that don’t seem to change expression,” says a journalist who followed him on the campaign trail. “He goes around in rumpled clothes and is as unsophisticated as he appears. He’s devout but he has no religious credentials.”

Some experts maintain that Ahmadinejad’s invective is solely for domestic consumption. “He’s not doing it to be confrontational,” one insists. “He’s only saying what others have said many times before. And he doesn’t care what the rest of the world thinks.”

However, the president’s utterances leave little room for misunderstanding. On October 26, he said: “Israel must be wiped off the map.” On December 8, he elaborated: “Some European countries insist on saying that during the second world war, Hitler burnt millions of Jews and put them in concentration camps. Any historian, commentator or scientist who doubts that is taken to prison or gets condemned . . . we don’t accept this claim.” Europe should provide a state for “the Zionists”, he added.

Last week, he went even further: “They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religion and the prophets. The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews . . . If you have burnt the Jews, why don’t you give a piece of Europe, the United States, Canada or Alaska to Israel . . . why should the innocent nation of Palestine pay for this crime?”

Iran’s interior minister said Ahmadinejad’s remarks had been “misunderstood”. However, his actions follow the ominous pattern of revolutionary governments: the withdrawal of ambassadors, the installation of a hardline cabinet, the overturning of reforms and the reported supply of insurgent bombs that have killed British soldiers in Iraq. Earlier this month, with talks stalled on Iran’s nuclear programme, the government announced plans to construct two more nuclear power stations.

Western leaders are now asking themselves how they misread Ahmadinejad so badly. They had pinned their hopes on the new generation of Iranians who were supposedly chafing under the restrictions of the Islamic republic, counting on a presidential victory by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the 70-year-old former president and so-called pragmatist.

Instead, with no leading reform candidate permitted to stand, a landslide swept in Ahmadinejad, who had cast himself as the Robin Hood of the devout and impoverished masses and promised to “cut off the hands of the mafia” responsible for rampant corruption linked to the Machiavellian Rafsanjani. He offered jobs for all and “petrol money on people’s tables”. It was the message the predominantly young population wanted to hear. He also had significant backing from the influential Revolutionary Guards.

Even then, the White House thought they could live with the new leader, says Geoffrey Kemp, an analyst at the Nixon Center in Washington. “Ahmadinejad’s first forays into foreign affairs tended to be dismissed as the naive posturing of someone new to the game. But the fact that he keeps repeating the same statements and adding new venom to them has got people rethinking this gentleman.”

New questions continue to emerge about Ahmadinejad’s murky past. Former hostages taken captive at the US embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held for 444 days have claimed he was one of the ringleaders. Donald Sharer, a retired navy captain, remembered him as “a cruel individual”.