Who Benefited and How From Ahmadinejad's Visit?

Sept. 26, 2007 — -- Homicide detectives ask, "Who benefits and how?" when they set out to solve a crime. So let's adopt that technique when we look at the visit to the United States this week by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The great cry of outrage that greeted Ahmadinejad in New York City -- and by press coverage extension throughout the world -- put him on everyone's front page, on everyone's evening and morning news and on everyone's radio talk show.

In this country, Ahmadinejad was roundly criticized, booed and denounced to his face. The New York Daily News put his picture on the front page with the slug "The Evil has Landed." And columnists and commentators roundly condemned his views and, in some cases, his very existence.

Perhaps the strangest episode occurred at Columbia University. Ahmadinejad was invited to speak in the name of free speech. But when he came, Lee Bollinger, under heavy criticism from some quarters for extending the invitation at all, felt called upon to read his guest the riot act using ad hominem invective we might expect from the likes of Hugo Chavez, not the president of Columbia University.

All right, who benefited from all this hue and cry?

Did we Americans benefit?

Surely we Americans already reject Ahmadinejad's views that Israel must be destroyed, that God will cause the United States to cease to exist, that his country is the most democratic of nations with its women citizens enjoying more freedom than its men, and that Iran has no homosexuals among its population.

That last point drew hearty laughter from the Columbia students, their common sense telling them otherwise. And when it comes to the rights of Iranian women, the eminent American scholar Haleh Esfandieri, who went to Iran to visit her 93-year-old mother only to be thrown in prison for four months and accused of spying, is testimony to the way the regime treats men and women it doesn't like in that country. And are there people in the United States who buy Ahmadinejad's claim that Iran with its hundreds of centrifuges working at top speed is not trying to develop a nuclear weapon? Surely not.

I could go on and on but you have long since gotten the point. Except to make ourselves feel better for being able to "spit in the face" of a man we loathe who heads a government we find threatening, there was, for us, no substantial benefit in the shouting and screaming with which we surrounded our visitor. I'll wager he did not change a single one of his hateful views because of the way he was greeted.

Ah, but what about Ahmadinejad?

If Ahmadinejad was on Fox News, he was also on Al Jazeera. If the Daily News put him front and center, so did countless publications across the Middle East and beyond. If Lee Bollinger won praise in some quarters here at home for his savage attack on the man he invited to speak, he did us no good in the eyes of people abroad whose hearts and minds we are struggling to win.

President Bush got it right. As President Ahmadinejad looked on, no doubt taking notes for what he hoped would be his opportunity later in the day to answer Bush directly, our president mentioned Iran only briefly in his speech at the United Nations, instead concentrating on such repressive regimes as those in Myanmar and Zimbabwe. As one White House aide put it to me, "What benefit would there have been for us to get in a 'You know what' match with a skunk?"

No, unfortunately, the benefit for this encounter went to Ahmadinejad. Next time he comes to this country, let's just ignore him. Let him rant and rave at the United Nations or wherever and with nobody bothering to take him seriously the story goes on page 28 and doesn't make the cut at all for the evening news.