WP Ahmadinejad Interview & the Stealth Dialogue

Today’s Washington Post includes a remarkable interview with Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, conducted by senior WaPo editor Lally Weymouth.
Ahmadinejad’s visit to the US, to speak at the UN, was intensely controversial in the US media, given the Iranian President’s harmful hard-line comments regarding the existence of Israel and the Holocaust. Columbia University felt compelled to withdraw an invitation to Ahmadinejad to speak (blaming “logistics”), and the Council on Foreign Relations downgraded a “sparring” session they hosted with him.
By the way, I urge CFR to post a full transcript of Ahmadinejad’s actual comments at their session, instead of their current report with its characterizations by critics of what was said. Whose sensitivities are being protected?
Ahmadinejad is quite the controversial figure inside Iran as well. A major Iranian reformist paper, Shargh, was suspended recently, ostensibly for running a cartoon that satirically alluded to reports of Ahmadinejad’s own mystical take on his visit to the UN last year.
All that said, I have a hunch the recent and important re-organizationof Iran’s foreign policy advisory system, authorized by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenehi, has resulted in an upgrading of the Iranian President’s understanding of international realities – and of the need for more diplomatic rhetoric.
Ahmadinejad certainly hasn’t been shy. In recent weeks, he’s given several long interviews with western media sources, including Anderson Cooper on CNN and Mike Wallace of 60 minutes. You know he did “well” by the magnitude of the vituperation being aimed in neocon circles at Mike Wallace. Just as Iranian reformists underestimated Ahmadinejad last year, so too have recent interviewers.
Ahmadinejad apparently was so emboldened by his perceived media success that he challenged Bush to a public debate – one that Bush understandably declined. (As perhaps his advisors recognized, he’d likely get “gored” – pardon the seven-year-old pun.)
Yet Ahmadinejad’s fiercest critics persist in the cardboard characterizations of Ahmadinejad as another “Hitler” – a madman with whom we cannot do any business. Robert Blackwill, a former Bush II national security official, characterized his encounter with Ahmadinejad at CFR rather bluntly, “If this man represents the prevailing government opinion in Tehran, we are headed for a massive confrontation with Iran.”
Similarly, Richard Hollbrooke, a former Clinton Administration Ambassador to the UN, today on CNN characterized Ahmadinejad’s recent statements and interviews as expressing “nothing new.”
I disagre. I think its worth examining just what Ahmadinejad has been saying – carefully – before throwing out the standard “devil” or “Hitler” hand grenades or summarilydismissing them as Hollbrooke and others have done.

In today’s WaPo interview, Weymouth hones in on the tough questions. Weymouth may have been irritated with his answers, and Ahmadinejad, as he usually does, bristled at the questions. But he doesn’t take the bait and give the desired “yes I said what you say and I agree with myself” answers.
On the Holocaust

You’ve made statements about the Holocaust, saying maybe it was exaggerated. Is that your opinion?
It’s not the numbers that are important here. It’s a very fundamental question: When we allow all researchers to do research freely, why don’t researchers have the right to research this history as well? Let’s remember that 60 million people were killed as a result of World War II. So let’s put everything in context and let’s research it further. . . . We know this was a historical event that has happened. But why is it that people who question it, even in the smallest sense, are persecuted and attacked?

First, notice the way the question was phrased, asking Ahmadinejad to affirm his comments that the Holocaust has been “exaggerated.” By important contrast, the standard rhetoric here in the US (from the President on down) and elsewhere (such as at CFR) has been to suggest that Ahmadinejad “denies” the Holocaust happened, that he believes it was all a myth. That’s clearly not his statement here. Its a distinction with a difference. No?
I of course agree that it’s outrageously provocative to even suggest that the holocaust was somehow exaggerated in history. Ahmadinejad instead admits here and elsewhere that the Holocaust was an “historical event” that indeed happened – even as he still clings to zingers about how it is interpreted or (elsewhere) why the Middle East was made to pay for Europe’s sins.
On wiping Israel off the map:

Are you really serious when you say that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth?
We need to look at the scene in the Middle East — 60 years of war, 60 years of displacement, 60 years of conflict, not even a day of peace. Look at the war in Lebanon, the war in Gaza — what are the reasons for these conditions? We need to address and resolve the root problem.
Your suggestion is to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth?
Our suggestion is very clear: . . . Let the Palestinian people decide their fate in a free and fair referendum, and the result, whatever it is, should be accepted. . . . The people with no roots there are now ruling the land.
You’ve been quoted as saying that Israel should be wiped off the face of the Earth. Is that your belief?
What I have said has made my position clear. If we look at a map of the Middle East from 70 years ago . . .
So, the answer is yes, you do believe that it should be wiped off the face of the Earth?
Are you asking me yes or no? Is this a test? Do you respect the right to self-determination for the Palestinian nation? Yes or no? Is Palestine, as a nation, considered a nation with the right to live under humane conditions or not? Let’s allow those rights to be enforced for these 5 million displaced people..

It seems to me that Ahmadinejad has been trying to change the practical effect of his prevous comments without quite being so candid. In this and other recent interviews, he shrewdly wants to change it into a question of “democracy” wherein all “Palestinians” – Jews, Muslims, and Christians – those living there presently and those in refugee status – should vote on Israel’s right to exist.
Of course, from an Israeli standpoint, this may seem a standard non-starter – though hardly unique in the region – as such a “democratic” election in effect challenges the Jewish state’s very reason for being.
Yet unlike other American journalists, Weymouth asks a critically important follow-up question:

If the Palestinian people decided that they wanted a two-state solution, would you support that decision?
The politicians in the United States should allow the Palestinians to vote, and then we’ll all respect the results. They won’t even accept a small Palestinian state. That’s why we think the root cause of the crisis must be addressed. Jews, like other individuals, will have to be respected. It’s not necessary to occupy the land of others, to displace them, to imprison their young people and to destroy their homes and agricultural fields and to attack neighboring countries.

Here again, Ahmadinejad artfully ducks the question, even as he does not toss its underlying implications aside. It seems to me that Ahmadinejad may in fact be moving closer to Iran’s long held suggested position – though not widley recognized here in the US – that in the end, Iran does “not wish to be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.” That is, (and I’m characterizing a complex set of top level statements over the past 15+ years here) if the Palestinians decide that they are willing to abide by a two-state solution to their conflict, then Iran will not stand in the way of that preference.
Of course, to those who prefer to characterize Iran as an inveterate “existential” threat to Israel, such analysis will no doubt seem the stuff of pipedreams. Yet given the stakes, dispassionate analysis and testing of such Iranian comments, especially those from President Ahmadinejad, seems very much in order.
There indeed is a “grand bargain” possibility out there – and the question of Israel/Palestine is part of it.
Several other issues raised in the WaPo interview are worth pondering, and I recommend a close reading. I’ll stop here though with what I think is a valid underlying core concern of the Iranians – the matter of will the US recognize Iran’s right to pick its own system?
Will it commit to grant the Islamic Republic’s “right to exist” or does it wish to “wipe it off the face of the map?” (to coin a phrase… ) Ahmadinejad complains about US “behavior” that suggest the US intends to interfere in Iran’s internal affairs – even as US leaders for the past 13 years have been complaining about Iranian “behavior.”
In the end, Weymouth’s opening question is critically important and works both ways: Does Ahmadinejad think “it would be in Iran’s best interest to move toward a normal relationship with the United States?” Likewise, does Bush think it would be in America’s best interest to at least have a “detente” – a lessening of tensions with Iran?
Bush’s important interview with David Ignatius, also in the Washington Post last week, suggests that Bush might indeed answer yes. Yet other recent Bush comments suggest that “parts of his administration” (and parts of Bush’s mind) are still toying with the “regime change” thesis frenetically propounded by the monarchist and neocon sources – e.g., Michael Ledeen and his “faster please” mantra.
Still, at root, I think it accurate to suggest that Bush wants a dialogue with Iran, and Ahmadinejad want a dialogue with the US; neither wants talk replaced with another war. Yet both also worry about “elements” in the other side’s governments who do not want to have such a dialogue. No doubt.
Ignatius seems spot on today in his own blog to note that there’s been a “virtual dialogue” ritual going on between Iran and the US.
I therefore propose a new mantra for Iran and the United States:
Get on with it. (!)