Keep Ahmadinejad talking

Just try your hand at deciphering this fatuous rant by the Iranian president:

"Some big powers still behave like the victors of the World War and regard other states and nations, even those that had nothing to do with the war, as the vanquished, and humiliate other nations and demand extortion from a condescending position similar to that of the master-servant relationship of the medieval ages."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad uttered this demented sentence before the United Nations General Assembly this past Tuesday. The preview to the U.N. spectacle, however, took place the day before, when Columbia University courageously hosted Ahmadinejad at a controversial Q-and-A forum.

Ahmadinejad adopted the same smug tone and unintelligible style at Columbia as he did at the United Nations, lying, whining and rambling his way through the event.

He managed to evade almost every one of the direct questions that Lee Bollinger, Ph.D., the university's president and organizer of the forum, forcefully and eloquently posed to him. He absurdly claimed that he had never denied the Holocaust when his own words on the subject were read back to him. He went on to proclaim that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

Simply put, Ahmadinejad's performance was an absolute disgrace.

So when news of the event at Columbia broke, anti-Iran hawks in the media and in Washington could hardly wait to pounce [HTML_REMOVED] on Columbia University.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a Republican presidential contender, threatened to cut off federal funding to the university if it dared to bring the Iranian president to campus.

"President Bollinger has forfeited his claim to intellectual seriousness," conservative commentator Lisa Schiffren declared.

"This is a liberal university president at his stupidest," sneered Bill Kristol, one of the leading intellectual godfathers of the current disaster in Iraq.

The event was a PR fiasco for a dangerous leader the world already mistrusts. Why, then, have Columbia University and its president come in for such unhinged abuse by Iran's alleged detractors?

There's little room for doubt that Ahmadinejad means us harm. The Tehran Times recently quoted the Iranian leadership's top military adviser as warning that American troops in Iraq are now "in Iran's firing range." The defense research group GlobalSecurity.org noted that the steady progress of Iran's nuclear program coincides with the rising belligerence of the Iranian president's rhetoric.

But there's also little room for doubt that the best arguments against Ahmadinejad come out of his own mouth. In his opening remarks at the Columbia forum, Bollinger pointed out that the Iranian leader's bellicose statements have already undermined support for his party among the Iranian populace.

In any case, it's difficult to determine just how influential Ahmadinejad is within the Tehran government. Earlier this year, Iranian blogger Esfandiar Saffari reported rumors that the mullahs' councils, which hold the highest legal authority in Iran, were considering serving two of Ahmadinejad's closest underlings with bills of impeachment.

Moreover, the series of riots in Tehran last June, spurred by a sharp increase in gasoline prices, starkly illustrated the shakiness of the Iranian regime's political position.

The irony [HTML_REMOVED] and the key to understanding the Iran hawks' weird reaction to the scene at Columbia [HTML_REMOVED] is that the neoconservative clique that lured the United States into Iraq and is now pressing for bombing raids in Iran has found itself in the same boiling political water as the Iranian president.

Anti-Iran militants in Washington, D.C. and in the conservative media have an interest in controlling the Iranian regime's image. If this group can portray the country as led by a single, unpredictable, messianic megalomaniac, then a compelling case for attacking Iran could still possibly be made.

But if this dangerous megalomaniac is actually the barely-literate buffoon who graced the stage at Columbia, whose political base is wobbly and whose power relative to the cautious mullahs is uncertain, then he is, well, much less useful.

The ugly truth is that Ahmadinejad and the Iran hawks in the United States need each other.

As the posturing of one becomes more aggressive, the other is only too happy to raise the stakes even higher. And as the stakes get higher, the hawks in both countries draw more and more reluctant supporters to their side. This is a road that leads to war.

But it doesn't have to [HTML_REMOVED] not yet, at least [HTML_REMOVED] and the confrontation between the theocratic goon and Columbia students has helped to avoid it. The Iranian president's ludicrous behavior undermines both the apocalyptic warnings of the Iran hawks and his own political position inside Iran.

For now, we ought to keep Ahmadinejad talking. It may be the key to peace, and at any rate, we'll have the pleasure of hearing his latest set of reactionary Islamist madlibs.

[Reach contributing writer Chris Kaasa at opinion@thedaily.washington.edu.]