When Mike met Mahmoud
By Jeff Jacoby
Townhall.com
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to see Adolf Hitler, Walter Winchell observed in 1938, "because you can't lick a man's boots over the phone." Why did Mike Wallace fly to Tehran?
Wallace's bio at the CBS website lauds his "no-holds-barred interviewing technique," but there was little evidence of that on Sunday, when "60 Minutes" aired his interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of the virulent Iranian theocracy that is the world's most active sponsor of jihadist terror.
Time and again Wallace let Ahmadinejad brush him off with inanities and lies he would have pounced on had they been uttered by a business executive or an American politician. When Wallace asked, for example, why Iranian Revolutionary Guards are helping terrorists in Iraq kill US soldiers, Ahmadinejad's non-reply was that the Americans shouldn't be in Iraq, since it is "a civilized nation with a long history of civilization." When Wallace didn't press for an answer to his question, Ahmadinejad flung it back at him. "According to international laws," he said, Iraqi security is the responsibility of "the occupation" -- that is, the US military. "Why are *they* not providing security?" Flummoxed, perhaps, by such Alice-in-Wonderland logic, Wallace dropped the subject.
And that, more or less, was the story of the interview. Wallace would pose a question, Ahmadinejad would swat it away with a preposterous retort, and Wallace would move on to something else.
Asked about the thousands of artillery rockets provided to Hezbollah by Iran, Ahmadinejad sneered: "Are you the representative of the Zionist regime or a journalist?" Confronted with Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, he declared that President Bush and his supporters want to monopolize energy resources and "line their own pockets."
You're a bigot who despises "the Zionists," Wallace challenged him. Not at all, said the man who wants Israel wiped off the map, I merely despise "heinous action."
For some reason, Wallace neglected to ask Ahmadinejad about Iran's brutal treatment of political dissidents. Or about the scores of anti-government demonstrations that have taken place across the country. Or about the 18-year trail of false reports Iran filed to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Or about allegations by former American diplomats that Ahmadinejad took part in the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran. Or about the ballistic missiles flaunted in Iranian military parades with banners reading "Death to America" and "We will trample America under our feet."
Perhaps Wallace simply ran out of time. Even a seasoned pro can't fit everything into one short interview, after all. Especially when he has to save room for exchanges like this:
Wallace: One of your aides just gave you a note. What is he telling you?
Ahmadinejad: Yes. They have told me to rearrange my jacket.
Wallace: They've been -- why are they worried about your jacket? I think you look just fine.
Ahmadinejad: That is right, they have told me the same thing, they tell me that it's a very nice-looking coat.
Wallace: Are you a vain man?
Ahmadinejad: Sometimes appearances, yes, you have to look your best.
Wallace: Let me reassure you --
Ahmadinejad: That is why I comb my hair.
Wallace: Let me assure you, you look your best. What do you do for leisure?
Ahmadinejad: I do many things, I have many hobbies.
Wallace: For instance?
Ahmadinejad: I study, I read books, I exercise. And, of course, I spend some time, quality time, with my family.
Wallace: You have three children?
Fawning over despots is something of an old habit with Wallace. His "60 Minutes" whitewash of the late Syrian tyrant Hafez Assad in 1975 so pleased the Damascus regime that years later the Syrian embassy in Washington was still distributing transcripts of the program. In 1990, as the Soviet Union was coming unraveled, Wallace assured his viewers that many Soviets "look back almost longingly to the era of brutal order under Stalin." Writing in Commentary the following year, David Bar-Illan described an obsequious Wallace interview with Yasser Arafat: "Had he treated American ... politicians this way, he would have been drummed out of the profession."
No danger of that. Wallace told the Boston Globe last December that if he could go one-on-one with Bush, he would ask him how someone so "incurious" could be suited for the presidency and whether his election "has anything to do with the fact that the country is so [expletive] up." A pity, Wallace must think, that America's president isn't more like Iran's -- that "rather attractive man," as he gushed about the world's leading Holocaust denier last week, "very smart, savvy, self-assured, good looking in a strange way ... infinitely more rational than I had expected him to be."
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