By PLS
John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, has been calling for radical reform of that body—when he hasn’t been advocating its complete dissolution. Seems he’s got company now. Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad also thinks the UN is an anachronism.
The two do disagree on an interesting point. Ahmedinejad thinks the US and Britain have too much power—eg, the veto on the Security Council. Bolton thinks the US has too little power to work its will through the UN.
There’s another divergence. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proposed a public debate and/or conversation with his American counterpart. George W. Bush’s official position, one frequently restated by John Bolton, is that he doesn’t want any conversations with Iran, let alone its president, not even about nuclear issues, until Iran capitulates to American demands to turn off those centrifuges—although some more or less unacknowledged conversations at variously lower levels have perforce been taking place.
It’s a headline grabber, that Bush-Ahmadinejad public debate proposal. So were the Ahmedinejad meetings with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
A year ago Western commentators were astonished that such a lightweight had been elected president of Iran. (JB and GWB note: elected. In a process deemed essentially fair by international observers. That’s called democracy, more or less.) Now Margaret Warner of the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer is reporting from Iran that Ahmadinejad has astonishing charisma, speaks effectively without a script and performs like a pro during news conferences. Imagine, then, what would happen if George Bush actually accepted the debate challenge. He’d be creamed.
Last night I was bored and restless and generally annoyed with the world and my life, so I checked out the TV schedule and discovered that I could watch Hatari, starring John Wayne, in Tanzania, as a supplier of live African animals for zoos. During my two years with USIS in Tanzania, I spent a lot of time in the bush, so this was the perfect antidote to my anomie: elephants, giraffes, wildebeeste, rhinos, leopards, ostriches, the works.
In the film, Wayne and company go bumpety-bump chasing after the animals in rattletrap vehicles, usually with Wayne in the super-macho fender-affixed lasso chair. Most animals just run like the dickens, but the big black rhino has another idea. He’s huge. He’s got horns and a hide like armor. So he charges the pickup. Thunk. And thunk. And thunk again. All I could think was, “Poor stupid rhino!” He’s caught, of course.
Today, learning of Ahmadinejad’s impossible but inspired proposition, I recalled that rhino and his name was George W. Bush, the tough guy who is equally out of touch with the realities of our complex and changing world. America is big and strong, according to his policy people, so we go charging into situations without thinking. Afghanistan. Thunk! Iraq. Thunk! Both situations misjudged, as were the “soulful” Putin and his Russia. No thunk there, yet, thank goodness!
And a thunk would be equally stupid in Iran.
Like many people, I couldn’t understand why the United States didn’t restrain Israel last month. Then I read Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker. Hezbollah had munitions bunkers and tunnels in Southern Lebanon. Iran has probably put some of its nuclear installations underground. So Lebanon was a trial run, he reports. Using US bombs! Click! But Israel’s version of “shock and awe” failed to do the job and, worse, turned into a public relations disaster. The same would happen should the US decide to bomb Iran.
The rhino is an endangered species. Let’s hope that the Bush backers in the Congress are, too.