Obama and Ahmadinejad: The Politics of Face Time
WASHINGTON — It was just over two years ago that Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois with aspirations to the presidency, famously pronounced during a Democratic debate in Charleston, S.C., that he would be willing to hold direct talks, without preconditions, with the president of Iran.
DEFIANCE The biggest issue between President Obama and Iran is the nuclear program that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lauded on “National Nuclear Day” in 2007.
This week, President Obama will have the chance to do just that, when Iran’s fiery, diminutive, Israel-bashing, legitimacy-challenged president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joins Mr. Obama and other world leaders who are descending on New York City to speak at the first United Nations General Assembly in the new kinder, gentler, Barack Obama era.
And guess what? Administration officials will be doing everything in their power to make sure the two don’t get within spitting distance of each other.
“You’ve got to get the Secret Service to put stumbling blocks in the way,” said Ray Takeyh, who until last month was a senior adviser for Iran at the State Department in the Obama administration. “You’ve got to quarantine that off. You’ve got to get the sniffing dogs out. You’ve got to make sure to avoid any kind of chance encounter with Ahmadinejad.”
A senior White House official was equally adamant in an interview Thursday night. “Having Ahmadinejad meet Obama — that’s just not going to happen,” he said. “You saw the events of the Iranian election and its aftermath. We were watching the behavior of the regime. While seeing that doesn’t change the fact that there’s a nuclear reality that has to be dealt with, it’s hard not to be affected by what we saw.”
Translation: After a summer in which the world watched Iranian protestors be brutalized on the streets of Tehran by government forces making sure that Mr. Ahmadinejad was retained as president after an election the world regards as fraudulent, the last place Mr. Obama wants to be caught is anywhere near the Iranian leader. Besides giving Mr. Ahmadinejad the sheen of legitimacy back at home, even the barest handshake between the West’s most popular political figure and one of its most reviled political foes could deflate Iran’s nascent political opposition, give conservative hawks in the United States even more to lambaste the president for, and send Israel over the edge.
Meanwhile, Mr. Ahmadinejad may have other ideas, some administration officials worry, since he has little to lose and everything to gain by being a gate-crasher at Mr. Obama’s photo op. Demonstrating his disregard for Western opinion and playing to the crowds at home, Mr. Ahmadinejad took another swipe at Israel on Friday, telling a rally in Tehran that the Holocaust was a “myth.” For sheer provocation, the timing was impeccable: the rally took place as Rosh Hashana was about to begin. The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, quickly condemned the remarks as “vicious lies.”
The United States has agreed to nuclear talks with Iran, Europe, Russia and China in October, but those are lower-level talks, not a chance for Mr. Ahmadinejad to take up Mr. Obama on his two-year-old promise. Both presidents will send diplomats to represent themselves.
And few people think those talks will go anywhere anyway. So, for the grand show to take place in New York this week, expect a President Obama whose behavior toward Iran will resemble that of his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Which may seem, at first, a bit curious. Just last week, Mr. Obama separated himself from one of President Bush’s muscular foreign policy initiatives when he abandoned the effort to put missile interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic over Russian objections. Republicans saw that as a sign of weakness in Mr. Obama, but the administration said it was just the opposite — a move that would allow placement of the interceptors closer to the real danger, Iran, and prompt Russia to cooperate more closely in containing the nuclear ambitions of — you guessed it — Mr. Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran. Which was also a goal of Mr. Bush.
Now, both Mr. Obama and Mr. Ahmadinejad are scheduled to address delegates in the cavernous hall of the General Assembly on Wednesday, and that is the most obvious point where they might make contact. When Mr. Bush addressed the General Assembly in September 2007, Mr. Ahmadinejad sat in the audience and listened, without outward reaction, as the American president slammed Iran as part of his litany of “brutal regimes” that should be confronted.
When Mr. Ahmadinejad delivered his rambling and defiant 40-minute speech a few hours later, the United States delegation pointedly left the hall, leaving only a note-taker to listen.
Ouch.
This time, while Mr. Obama probably won’t use language as strong as Mr. Bush used to denounce Iran — he has, after all, tried in recent months to extend his unclenched fist, sending letters to Iran’s supreme leader and wishing the regime a Happy Nowruz and the like. But don’t expect him to sit in the hall and listen to Mr. Ahmadinejad deliver his expected rant.
“I don’t think even Susan will be there,” said Mr. Takeyh, who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was referring to Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations. But Mr. Ahmadinejad, Mr. Takeyh said, “will probably be in the audience when President Obama speaks. That’s unavoidable. He may pull a Chávez, but I don’t think he’ll rush the stage.”
Translation: “Pulling a Chávez” refers to the now-infamous handshake between President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Mr. Obama at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago back in April. The handshake riled Republicans, and former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that it could be a sign of weakness on Mr. Obama’s part. (Mr. Chávez also sidled up to Mr. Obama later and gave him a book.)
Mr. Ahmadinejad may have similar ideas. Already, government-run Iranian news media outlets have hinted that there may be a meeting between the two presidents, which a White House official said had “zero chance” of being true.
“Ahmadinejad would use that to enormous benefit,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. The Iranian president, Mr. Milani and other foreign policy experts said, would exploit such a photo op to present himself to the world as the “leader of the South in the North-South divide.”
Mr. Ahmadinejad is expected to talk a lot in New York about nuclear apartheid, and how the West thinks it can have nuclear weapons and no one else can, and to present himself as a leader who speaks for the developing world. In that context, standing next to the leader of the developed world could do Mr. Ahmadinejad a lot of good back home.
And for all of the talk of engagement, doing Mr. Ahmadinejad a lot of good back home is the last thing the White House wants.
