Painting Iranian Prez as mad man
Anyone who was in New York City last week must have thought the place had gone to the devil.

I refer to the ugly commotion that surrounded the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was here attending the General Assembly of the United Nations.

The revolting treatment of him showed just how successful the Bush administration has been at selling its perverse and unproductive brand of foreign policy, which is that you don't talk to people who disagree with you. Instead, you vilify them, paint them as buffoons, portray them as the sole source of your problems, and make them out to be evil.



When Ahmadinejad asked if he could visit Ground Zero during his visit, all hell broke loose. No way, said Mayor Bloomberg and his police commissioner, while presidential hopefuls Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Rodham Clinton nodded vigorously in the background. Sure, Ahmadinejad's request was partly an act of political showmanship. But as far as I know, the Iranians played no role in 9/11. And if he wanted to make a token gesture of solidarity with Americans who suffered a terrible loss on that day, how harmful is that?

Then came the circus at Columbia University. After making a huge deal about the academy's commitment to free speech and open debate, Columbia president Lee Bollinger publicly insulted the Iranian president as if he were a naughty child.

If you invite someone to your house, you treat them with courtesy and a modicum of respect. Ask hard questions, for sure. But when you insult them so viciously before they can even get a word out, you have shut down any real opportunity for dialogue. Bollinger was showboating for the benefit of those who criticized him for allowing Ahmadinejad on campus in the first place.

His actions were also counterproductive. At a time when the United States is trying to find a way to co-exist peacefully in a world with millions of Muslims, belittling the elected leader of 75 million Iranians will be read as a calculated insult to all Muslims. And this will be true whether they share Ahmadinejad's beliefs or agree with Bollinger's.

The media once more embarrassed itself by engaging in childish and unrestrained behavior. Headlines and articles described the Iranian president as "evil," "loony" and a "grinning madman." Whenever this kind of litany of epithets starts up about some foreign leader, invariably spun out of Washington and passed along by the press, my inner alarm goes off. I know the person has thwarted our government's designs in some way, and that they're itching to take him out. "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad," Euripides said. Isn't that how the Bush administration revved up a war against Saddam Hussein, who was supposedly cooking up a nasty brew of weapons to use on you and me? As Dr. Phil would say, "How's that working for ya?"

Some journalists asked what could we possibly learn by giving a forum to the evil Ahmadinejad. Well, quite a bit, according to 140 church leaders who held a more civil meeting with the Iranian leader two days after the smackdown at Columbia. Two of them described him as a former professor of engineering, a former mayor of Tehran, something of an Islamic scholar, a deeply religious man, and someone whose political views are far more nuanced than they've been described in the press.

While he may share a deep resentment over Israel's control over much of the Palestinian territories that is felt by many Palestinians, he has said he does not support a military solution to the conflict, said Chris Ferguson, the World Council of Churches representative to the United Nations. And while his statements about the Holocaust have, at times, been disingenuous, his real complaint is that it focuses solely on the Jewish victims and has been used against the Palestinians. Ahmadinejad's remark at Columbia about there being no homosexuals in Iran showed a certain lack of touch with reality. But think of all the goofy things George W. Bush has said. I don't know if Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons, either. But I know we've been deceived by similar claims this administration has made about weapons of mass destruction.

"Many of the ideas about his being evil are based on things he didn't say," Ferguson told me. "You may find what he actually says to be unacceptable. But we should try to hold him to dialogue around what he's actually saying."

Last week, the argument flying around was that anybody who chose to communicate with Ahmadinejad was naive or foolish. But that was just good old American arrogance talking. And history has proved that arrogance is a most destructive form of foreign policy.

Sheryl McCarthy

can be reached at mccart731@

aol.com

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