Of Gestures and Truth, of Wreaths and Intent Letter From America
By Richard Bernstein
That was quite a softball that the Iranian United Nations Mission served up to the American political class last week.
It passed along the surprising request that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, due here this week to attend the General Assembly, be allowed to visit New York’s hallowed Ground Zero and lay a wreath to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. The presidential candidates swatted the notion out of the park.
The site of the attack “must not be a backdrop for President Ahmadinejad to posture,” Barack Obama said.
“An insult to the memory of those who died on 9/11,” said a spokesman for Fred Thompson, the latest Republican entrant into the presidential candidate field.
“Unacceptable” thundered Hillary Clinton, noting that Iran’s president “refuses to renounce and end his own country’s support of terrorism.”
It was an easy one, Ahmadinejad’s request, cheeky in the extreme, and nobody complained when it was turned down by the New York City police. My first reaction was to fantasize asking Ahmadinejad permission to place a wreath at Tehran’s Evin Prison.
That’s where Ali Shakeri, the Iranian-American businessman, has been held, without charge and in solitary confinement for four months, apparently for promoting what he has called “peace building” between Iran and the United States.
Needless to say, I would not be granted that publicity gesture in dictatorial Tehran, and it seemed a no-brainer that Ahmadinejad, who continues to defy the United Nations and to pursue his uranium enrichment program, wouldn’t be allowed this sort of publicity gesture either.
But things are not really that simple. The fact is that, like last year, the Iranian president’s reception will be mixed as New Yorkers, like other Americans, struggle among contradictory impulses – to shun Ahmadinejad altogether, to argue with him, or to hear what he has to say. And New York’s puzzlement reflects the West’s general puzzlement over how to deal with Iran these days – whether to keep negotiating, to push for harsher sanctions, or to threaten war.
And that’s the way it has been before. Last year, the august and very establishmentarian Council on Foreign Relations in New York had Ahmadinejad in for a discussion. The session was boycotted by some of the club’s members but the Iranian, according to press accounts of the meeting, held his own pretty well.
This year, the no less august and establishmentarian Columbia University has invited Ahmadinejad to give a speech and answer questions from students and faculty, and the gesture required a special explanation from Columbia officials. Ahmadinejad was expected at Columbia on Monday.
“Necessarily, on occasion, this will bring us into contact with beliefs many, most, or even all of us will find offensive and even odious,” the university’s president, Lee Bollinger, declared of Ajmadinejad’s impending visit. “We trust our community, including our students, to be fully capable of dealing with these occasions, through the power of dialogue and reason.”
There is of course a difference between a grandiose gesture and a dialogue, so it isn’t inconsistent for the New York police to have said “no” on Ground Zero while Columbia said “yes” to a speech.
Still, the funny thing is that the Columbia invitation may actually play more into Ahmadinejad’s hand than the 9/11 gesture would have.
Ahmadinejad’s game has always been to incarnate both the good cop and the bad cop in the same person. He gets credit at home for standing up to America and the Europeans by flouting the United Nations and insisting on his country’s right to develop nuclear technology.
At the same time, he makes well-timed gestures of reasonableness and accommodation. He did by agreeing recently to a deal with the International Atomic Energy Agency by which Iran is to finally answer all of the unanswered questions about its nuclear development program in order to forestall the tougher sanctions that might otherwise be enacted.
In the meantime, of course, Iran’s nuclear program, which the United States and the Europeans believe is aimed at producing an atomic bomb, continues apace, even as the West blusters about war and strives to negotiate at the same time.
It’s understandable that Columbia would want a chance to hear the president of Iran, and maybe challenge him with tough questions. As John Coatsworth, acting dean of its School of International and Public Affairs, which is sponsoring Ahmadinejad’s appearance, argued, listening to “controversial speakers of different views” is “central to the education and training of students for citizenship.”
Still, would Columbia ever invite a white supremacist, or an evolutionary creationist, or an advocate of the murder of abortion doctors to speak on campus, counting on the power of dialogue to counter offensive and even odious ideas? Clearly it wouldn’t. Why a different decision on Ahmadinejad? Well, the man is a head of state and possibly even a historical figure the understanding of whom has more than academic value. And what good would it do really not to talk to him?
Still, I’d argue that it would have been better for him to lay his wreath at Ground Zero than to be received at Columbia, where he will be introduced by Bollinger himself.
It would have opened him up to certain questions. Maybe somebody at Columbia will ask them anyway. For example: If you’re sorry about the victims of 9/11, what about the victims of the Holocaust, which you deny took place? And, When are you going to lay a wreath to the victims of violence by Hamas and Hezbollah, whom you bankroll, train and arm?
Talking to him stems in part from the old line about the proper response to objectionable speech being more speech. But it’s also a way of telling Ahmadinejad this: Put your money where your wreath would have been, Mr. President, because if you don’t, we’ll know even better what kind of guy you are.
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E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com
Tomorrow: John Vinocur on France’s goals behind the rekindling of its strategic relationship with America.
Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.
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