Mia voĉo (My voice)

A Guest In the House

I'm not one of the world's great fans (if any) of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, current President of Iran. I wouldn't have voted for him in 2005 even if I were an Iranian; I probably wouldn't vote for him in 2009 (same conditions). He strikes me largely as a typical politician, with some weird ideas.

Last Sunday my wife asked me: why was he treated so badly while he was in New York?

Good question. I saw his "60 Minutes" interview, which was more like a grilling under torture than an interview. The interviewer, for instance, asked whether Iran intended to build nuclear weapons. Ahmadinejad hemmed and hawed for a while, like any politician being interviewed, and finally, under repeated questioning, answered "No!" But even after that the interviewer kept insisting that Ahmadinejad would not give a straight answer (how much straighter can you get than "No!"?).

He was invited to speak at Columbia University. From what I heard, the President of Columbia, introducing him, treated him more like a rabid dog than a welcome guest. I gather that the students who were present to listen were considerably more polite, except at one point at which Ahmadinejad insisted that there were no gays in Iran (thus displaying a willful ignorance of his own country as well as one of human biology — so what else can you expect of a politician?).

When you have a guest in the house, even if you don't like him you treat him as a guest, i.e. politely. I think that should be as true for nations as for individuals. If so, the treatment Ahmadinejad got here should make us all feel a bit ashamed of ourselves.

Partition

Some years ago I blogged here about the possibility (probability?) that the ultimate fate of Iraq, following the example of the sometime nation of Yugoslavia, would be to become divided, like Caesar's Gaul, into three parts, one in the south for the Shiites, one in the west for the Sunnis, and one in the north for the separate Kurdish ethnic group. Apparently Senator Joe Biden somewhat later came up with the same idea, not as a regrettable potential result of the stresses and strains afflicting the nation of Iraq but as a consummation devoutly to be wished. Now Biden has apparently convinced the U.S. Senate, desparately struggling to find some way out of Bush's ill-conceived intervention in that unfortunate country, to take up the idea and pass a nonbinding measure (75-23 -- I'd love to know who voted against) to "federalize" (i.e. break up) the country.

I still think that this is probably the unfortunate destiny of modern Iraq. But, ultimately, that is for the Iraqis, not the U.S. Senate or any other arm of the U.S. government, to decide. They may yet get their act together and rebuild a strong Iraq.

The Iraqis themselves are not particularly happy with the Senate's bill, and who can blame them? After all, if the Chinese parliament voted to make California independent of the United States, I doubt whether many Americans, including my fellow Californians, would be particularly enthused by the idea. The fate of Iraq is, after all, Iraq's to determine, not Washington's.