Ahmadinejad's Sep/23/2010 Gift to the US

What exactly is Ahmadinejad (where do they get these names?) up to?

Background: He’s no buffoon. He’s smart. The WSJ’s Bret Stephens remarked after a press breakfast meeting with this guy that, “ Perhaps I haven't achieved the appropriate degree of jadedness, but my own impression of Ahmadinejad was that he was easily the smartest guy in the room. He mocked us in a way we scarcely had the wit to recognize. We belittle him at our peril.”

Last year we were pretty sure he was levering the West for handouts, in the fashion of Libya. It’s worked all over the globe. We were pretty sure too he was up to the old autocrat’s trick of create-an-enemy when things are tough at home. And for him, things are tough; he’s in a rolling run-in with the mullahs; they don’t like each other. And his economy is in the tank. So it all fits. But there must be something else.

We noted earlier that the unilateral sanctions (US, EU, Canada, Australia) combined with the now public threat of a strike might do the trick - enabling the masses (predictably, BO abandoned them last time). Certainly the sanctions have been effective, squeezing the Iranian economy.

But of course Ahmadinejad can’t cave in public. Thus, today’s rant was designed to acquire allies, in both the mid east and Asia, for his last run.

What shocked so many innocent types however was the applause as Ahmadinejad put America behind 9/11, or at least raised the real possibility. If folks were shocked it is only because they have never understood the UN, a place were petty henchmen and mass murderers gather as equals (one nation / one vote) with great democracies. It is what it has always been - a fraud. The UN notion of “sovereign equality” is a big joke. There is nothing “equal” about it.

Today’s rant then was a gift to those Americans who for years have known the UN in its present form is worse than useless, and who for years have called for an end to US funding; get the whole crowd out of NY; they can gather elsewhere.

Now, that is closer, much closer to becoming reality.

Robert Craven