U.N. POWER PLAYS
WHERE W SEEKS POWER FOR THE PEOPLE, AHMADINEJAD CLAIMS IT FOR HIMSELF
John Podhoretz
NEW YORK POST
Opinion
September 20, 2006
EIGHT hours after President Bush appeared at the United Nations to offer mostly soothing words of encouragement to the peoples of the Middle East who live under the barbarous yoke of tyranny, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hit the U.N. stage last night with an address blatantly positioning himself as a fearless world leader willing to confront the supposed tyrants of the West.
Ahmadinejad didn't come out like a Soviet leader of yore and scream, "We will bury you," which had commentators in the immediate aftermath of his speech falling over themselves to welcome a "kinder and gentler" Ahmadinejad (that was Wolf Blitzer of CNN).
And indeed, Ahmadinejad didn't say he would wipe Israel off the map or deny the Holocaust.
Evidently we're supposed to grade on a curve now.
Sure, he was probably one of the student monsters who took 51 of our diplomats captive and held them hostage for 444 days back in 1979-80, but let L'il Mahmoud now stand in front of the green U.N. marble without a tie and with a cute little beard, and suddenly he's a Tehran Munchkin.
True, he did spend a lot of time in his speech talking about peace and justice and the pain of the oppressed and candy canes and cake and lollipops. But that was pure window dressing.
Substantively, Ahmadinejad was setting himself up as a revolutionary reformer seeking to overhaul the international system to make it fairer for the world's less powerful countries.
He offered up a cockamamie scheme for the reorganization of the Security Council - one that would empower voting representatives from various organizations that are run for the convenience of tinpot dictators and thugs, groups like the so-called Non-Aligned Movement and the Union of Islamic Nations.
"Who will speak for the oppressed?" wondered this spokesman for an "Islamic democracy" so corrupt that he was only elected the titular head of his government because vast numbers of possible voters sat out the election in protest.
The notion of an unjust concentration of world power in the hands of Western democracies is an old Leftist conceit, and though Ahmadinejad is the president of a pointedly reactionary religious regime, he sounded very much like a 1970s Leftist - including talk about "imperialism" that was so old I could practically visualize the gas tank of a Ford Pinto blowing up while he was speaking.
And while he insisted that his nation only wants to develop "peaceful" nuclear energy, Ahmadinejad made a point of claiming that the United States dominates world discussion because of its nuclear arsenal. If indeed that is what he believes, then surely a person who wishes the world system to be rebalanced in his own country's favor would find the pursuit of nuclear weaponry an urgent and overwhelming necessity.
But while Ahmadinejad came to play, the American president had a different game in mind.
George W. Bush has already made it clear in the past month that he will not accept a nuclear Iran, a view that commits him to a military strike should all else fail. And clearly, he chose not to use the U.N. venue to start a countdown or initiate a showdown with Ahmadinejad.
Instead, Bush emulated Ronald Reagan's enormously important and influential 1988 speech at Moscow State University, where the Gipper spoke plainly to the Russian people about democracy and freedom and how they work.
In this case, Bush tried to speak directly to the ordinary folk throughout the Middle East, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria and Iran (and also to those suffering through unimaginable horror in Darfur) about what America really believes, really wants and is really trying to do to help them and the world.
For Americans who've been listening closely to Bush in the past six weeks, it was the same old, same old. But maybe for those in the Muslim world able and willing to hear a message of hope, Bush spoke words they will long remember.
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