AMERICA Comment Column The consequences of that wild and crazy Ahmadinejad JOHN IBBITSON 26 September 2007The Globe and Mail Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's talk at Columbia University on Monday was so funny it could lead to war. The Iranian President, who was in New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly, accepted an invitation to speak and to take questions at Columbia. The invitation afforded a valuable opportunity to assess the political leader directly rather than through the filter of press reports. Mr. Ahmadinejad, it turns out, is a laugh riot. When asked why his regime executed homosexuals, he replied: "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country. I don't know who's told you that we have it." As one wag in this office observed, there'd be no homosexuals in Canada, either, if it were a hanging offence. When asked why women in Iran are deprived of fundamental human rights, Mr. Ahmadinejad insisted the very opposite was the case. Iranian women are so highly valued, he said, that "they are exempt from many responsibilities. Many of the legal responsibilities rest on the shoulders of men in our society because of the respect, culturally given, to women." There's more, folks. After exalting the importance of scientific inquiry, Mr. Ahmadinejad went on to warn that "one of the main harms inflicted against science is to limit it to experimental and physical sciences." Scientific research, he insisted, must be guided by purity of spirit and submission to divine will - which explains why the Islamic world took a pass on the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. And he castigated those "bullying powers" who "violate individual and social freedoms in their own nations," who "do not respect the privacy of their own people," and who "create an insecure psychological atmosphere in order to justify their warmongering acts." This, from the President of Iran? Stop, you're killing me. Anyone who watched that presentation with an open mind, or who listened to Mr. Ahmadinejad's arrogant diatribe against "impious powers" at the General Assembly yesterday, must have shared Columbia president Lee Bollinger's "revulsion at what you stand for." And that's a problem. We are entering very dangerous days with Iran. Despite Mr. Ahmadinejad's insistence that his country has neither homosexuals nor a covert nuclear weapons program, it's pretty certain that both exist. The United States and Britain want the UN to tighten economic sanctions against Iran, and France has gone from cringing accommodation under Jacques Chirac to blunt confrontation under Nicolas Sarkozy. "There will be no peace in the world if the international community falters in the face of nuclear arms proliferation," the French President told the General Assembly yesterday. "Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace. They lead to war." Welcome back, France. But Russia and China continue to block tougher sanctions. One solution might be a joint European-North American agreement on stricter trade and financial embargoes. If Iran persists in its nuclear weapons program, however, it will become increasingly difficult to stay the hands of the hawks. The West mustn't, and Israel won't, ever allow people such as Mr. Ahmadinejad to acquire nuclear capability. And yet, it's more complicated than that. Iran's President is only one of several actors in the country's power structure, and not necessarily the most powerful. There is internal opposition to the current regime; Mr. Ahmadinejad could be removed by the voters before he is removed by any coalition. If the sanctions are too oppressive, or if Israel or the West strikes prematurely, then moderate voices in Tehran could be silenced. How do we know the current regime isn't actually trying to incite an attack, as an excuse to suppress domestic opposition? If Mr. Ahmadinejad sought, through his talks at Columbia and the UN, to soften his personal image and to present his regime as moderate and humane, he failed miserably. His endless evasions, circumlocutions and occasional accidental flashes of brutality could only harden opposition among people of goodwill to him and to his regime. It would be good to see the end of Mr. Ahmadinejad. It was good to see the end of Saddam Hussein. There were consequences in that instance, however, and there would be consequences this time, too. It will take wisdom in Washington and London and Paris and Berlin to navigate between the evils of appeasement and imperialism, to contain Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without turning Iran into Iraq. Still, I don't know about you, but I could do without having to listen to that man again.
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