Playing into Ahmadinejad's hands

The self-proclaimed intellectuals at Columbia and the vast majority of commentators completely missed the significance of Iranian President Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York. Columbia President Bollinger, the Columbia students and pundits are pleased with their seemingly tough questions to the president, but that's a flawed, American-centric view. Ahmadinejad wasn't playing to the audience at Columbia; he was playing to his audience in Iran, and Columbia played right into his hands.

Ahmadinejad won his office in Iran on a platform of raising the standard of living in Iran by sharing more of the nation's oil wealth. Since he came into office, the price of oil has doubled, but instead of sharing more of that wealth with his people, the government has funneled it into its nuclear program, weapons, and terrorist proxies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon.

The Iranian government hasn't used this tremendous oil money to either raise the standard of living for Iranians or to reinvest in its oil production industry which is falling apart, and as a result the popular support of the government is so low it was on the verge of falling. In order to shore up popular support in the past, the government would kidnap foreign sailors and parade them in front of the cameras as criminals and trespassers to incite nationalism. When Iran recently pulled this stunt with the captured British sailors and marines, it failed to generate popular support.

Since then the Mullahs have been searching for another way to generate popular support for their government while accelerating their nuclear program, militarization and funding of terrorist proxies.

They took this opportunity at the UN to send Ahmadinejad to the US to draw a confrontation with Americans. From reading all the recent press, it's apparent that most Americans don't understand that Ahmadinejad is not the dictator of Iran. Iran is run by the Mullahs, and Ahmadinejad is simply their public face, doing what they tell him.

Ahmadinejad offered to lay a wreath at ground zero in order to draw that confrontation, and the New York Police complied. It was a win-win move for Ahmadinejad: either New York would acquiesce, and Ahmadinejad would get a photo-op at ground zero for propaganda back home, or New York would deny him access, and he would look like a generous, compassionate man compared to petty Americans. He got the second response, and Iranians rallied around him.

Then Columbia offered to let him speak, setting up another guaranteed confrontation. Bollinger's attack on Ahmadinejad to open the discussion couldn't have been better choreographed to fuel anti-Americanism in Iran. While self-proclaimed intellectuals joke among themselves that Ahmadinejad's answers to questions at Columbia made him look foolish, it's actually the intellectuals who are foolish because they haven't looked beyond their own noses. Ahmadinejad's answers were directed at Iranians. When viewed in that light, they make sense. In just one example, Ahmadinejad was telling his domestic audience, almost all Muslims, that there are no homosexuals in Iran, unlike the west. This was a declaration of the superior culture of Iran compared to the degenerate west. It worked perfectly on his domestic audience.

Because we completely failed to understand the motives of Ahmadinejad in his trip to New York, we inadvertently provided a critical popularity boost to his extreme government. At a time when regime change in Iran is the ideal solution to the problems Iran is causing in the Middle East, and the US is actively pursuing regime change there, that failure was a dangerous blunder. But the intellectuals still haven't noticed because they're too busy patting each other and themselves on the back.

Maybe the self-proclaimed intellectuals will take notice that newspapers in Iran, many usually critical of Ahmadinejad, are now praising him for standing up to the lion in his den. Columbia did the Mullah's and their nuclear program a big favor by pushing Iranians to support their government.