NYT : ‘Fruitbat’ at Bat

‘Fruitbat’ at Bat

By MAUREEN DOWD | September 26, 2007

First, we break Iraq and hand it over to the Shiites, putting in a puppet who leans toward Iran and is aligned with the Shiite militias bankrolled by Iran. Then, as Peter Galbraith writes in The New York Review of Books, President Bush facilitates “the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed militia,” with the ironic twist that “there is now substantially more personal freedom in Iran than in Southern Iraq.”

And on top of all that, we help build up the self-serving doofus Iranian president, a frontman with a Ph.D. in traffic management, into the sort of larger-than-life demon that the real powers in Iran — the mullahs — can love.

New York’s hot blast of nastiness, jingoism and xenophobia toward its guest, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, only served to pump him up for his domestic audience. Iranians felt that their president had tied everyone in knots, including the “Zionist Jews,” as Iranian state television said. The Times reports that Mohsen Rezai, a former head of the Revolutionary Guards, was on TV criticizing the rude treatment his president received: “It is shocking that a country that claims to be civilized treats him that way.”

(It also raised his profile on the evening news here. Katie Couric dryly has told people that she remembers how to pronounce his name with the mnemonic “I’m a dinner jacket.”)

After the Bay of Pigs, J.F.K. and his advisers worried that American foreign policy would no longer seem intelligent. W. doesn’t even try for an intelligent foreign policy. He wallows in a willfully ignorant foreign policy. And this week, his irrational ways were contagious.

The Daily News headline, “The Evil Has Landed,” was one of the milder imprecations. Consider this reasoned analysis from Greg Gutfeld of Fox News: “So the foul-smelling fruitbat Ahmadinejad spoke at that crack house known as Columbia University today.”

The heavy-handed, small-minded reaction that played into the hands of the slippery “I’m a dinner jacket” is not excused by Iran wishing the U.S. and Israel gone.

The Soviet Union’s stated policy for 70 years was the total eradication of American capitalism and democracy — backed up during the cold war with actual nuclear weapons. But while challenging the policies and ideology of the Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan understood he had to engage Mikhail Gorbachev, not ignore or insult him.

Reagan was able to help the Soviet Union — and world communism — to fall apart. All W. has managed to do is destroy the country he wanted to turn into a democracy and make Iran more powerful than it was before.

In a sad testimony to how bollixed up things are in Iraq, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki told the Council on Foreign Relations Monday that civil war has been averted in Iraq — not! — and that Iranian intervention has “ceased to exist.” Gen. David Petraeus recently said that Iran was providing “lethal” support to Iraqi militias.

The president’s irrelevant U.N. speech was a bad combo with the schoolyard name-calling of Lee Bollinger. Even some in the anti-Ahmadinejad audience gasped a bit as Columbia’s president gave the meanest introduction in the history of introductions — one that only managed to elevate the creep sitting on stage with his thugs. Once you’ve made the decision to invite a tyrannical leader, you can’t undo it by belittling him in public. Universities are supposed to be places where you can debate and hear dissenting voices; it would have been far better just to hand the mike to the students and let it rip.

Given the repressive and confused stance of some of our Middle East allies on women and gays, isn’t it insane to get into a war of ideas on homosexuality in the Muslim world?

President Bush is the one who hardened the Iranian resolve to get a nuclear weapon with his policy of negotiating with countries like North Korea that have nukes and invading countries that don’t, like Iraq.

W. and his advisers always act shocked that Iran is meddling in Iraq. Why wouldn’t Iran inflate itself at the expense of its former foe and current enemy?

Even after the Iranian hostage crisis, America never really tried to comprehend the tribal politics in Iran — or Iraq — or bolster the Arab speakers in the intelligence community.

As Mr. Galbraith wrote, Iran’s nuclear program is about prestige. Iranians want to be seen “as a populous, powerful, and responsible country that is heir to a great empire and home to a 2,500-year-old civilization. In Iranian eyes, the U.S. has behaved in a way that continually diminishes their country” — from U.S. involvement in the 1953 coup that reinstated the Shah to W.’s branding them as part of the “axis of evil.”

Wouldn’t sticks and carrots — cultural fluency, smart psychology and Reaganesque dialogue — be a better way to bring the Iranians around than sticks and stones?

Reuters : Outrage turns to laughter at Ahmadinejad NY speech

Outrage turns to laughter at Ahmadinejad NY speech

By Mark Egan | September 25, 2007

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Vilified as a Holocaust denier, a supporter of terrorism and a backer of Iraqi insurgents, the president of Iran was actually able to make New Yorkers burst into laughter -- but not at a joke.

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at Columbia University on Monday in response to a question about the recent execution of two gay men there.

"In Iran we do not have this phenomenon," he continued. "I do not know who has told you we have it."

Loud laughs and boos broke from the audience of about 700 people, mostly students at the Ivy League school whose garb included "Stop Ahmadinejad's Evil" T-shirts.

Everyone from presidential candidates to September 11 families had expressed outrage that Ahmadinejad would speak there.

After his assertions that Israel persecutes Palestinians and that Iran's nuclear program is for energy not weapons, the Iranian leader's comment on gays broke the tension.

But it spurred strong reaction too.

"This is a sick joke," said Scott Long of Human Rights Watch, saying Iran tortures gays under a penal code that punishes homosexuality between men with the death penalty.

When Ahmadinejad, speaking in Farsi, actually tried to crack a joke, it drew no laughter, although maybe the nuance was lost in translation.

"Let me tell a joke here," Ahmadinejad said. "I think the politicians who are after atomic bombs, or testing them, making them, politically they are backward, retarded."

The crowd seemed uncertain how to react. Some applauded that pacifist sentiment, others seemed befuddled by the insensitive use of the word retarded.

DELUGE OF OBJECTIONS

Ahmadinejad's visit here was preceded by a deluge of objections when it became apparent he wanted to lay a wreath at Ground Zero and that he would speak at Columbia.

Presidential candidates from both major U.S political parties took swipes at the president of a country President George W. Bush calls part of "the axis of evil." They said he denied the Holocaust, supported terrorism and armed Iraqi insurgents.

U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York had a different way of capturing all that.

"Sometimes we have snakes slithering through the streets of New York," Weiner told protesters outside the United Nations, where Ahmadinejad will speak on Tuesday.

And in a city known for its blunt manners, the Iranian president's reception was bound to be frosty. The New York Daily News had the front page headline, "The Evil Has Landed."

At Columbia, university President Lee Bollinger pulled no punches. He called him a "petty and cruel dictator" and said his Holocaust denials suggested he was either "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated."

"I feel the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for," Bollinger said to loud applause.

In retort, Ahmadinejad berated Bollinger as a rude host.

"Many parts of his speech were insults," he said. "We actually respect our students and the professors by allowing them to make their own judgments."

Not everybody objected to his speaking appearance.

"If the (Columbia) president thinks it's a good idea to have the leader from Iran come and talk to the students as an educational experience, I guess it's OK with me," Bush told Fox News.

(Additional reporting by Claudia Parsons, Michael Erman, Michelle Nichols and Megan Davies)

© Reuters 2007 All rights reserved

CBC : Ahmadinejad's planned UN speech draws fire

Ahmadinejad's planned UN speech draws fire

September 18, 2007 | 3:25 PM ET

Washington has reluctantly granted a visa for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to address the UN next week, but a Republican presidential candidate says the Iranian president should instead be handed an indictment.

The White House said Ahmadinejad was given the visa for travel to the United States, but will not be permitted to go more than 40 kilometres from the UN headquarters in New York City.

Both the invitation to address the General Assembly on Sept. 25 and the U.S. government's decision to allow Ahmadinejad into the country drew fire from U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

"If President Ahmadinejad sets foot in the United States, he should be handed an indictment under the Genocide Convention," he wrote in a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday.

Romney cited Ahmadinejad's much-publicized verbal attacks on Israel, support for the Lebanese-based militant organization Hezbollah and his "pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities."

Ahmadinejad will leave for New York on Sunday, give his address and then return to Iran on Sept. 29, the Associated Press reported.

He has addressed the General Assembly twice before. His speech in September of 2006 included attacks on the U.S. and Britain for their policies opposing Iran's nuclear program.

The United Nations' 62nd General Assembly convened on Tuesday.

With files from the Associated Press