Mahmoud Ahmadinejad managed to sustain his star billing for yet another year. This is his sixth visit to New York, and in what has become the ritual opening of the fall season he has worked his way through a grueling – but apparently personally exhilarating – schedule of A-list media spots.
The work of his advance team at the Iranian UN mission, which has spent the last six months carefully negotiating an endless series of “exclusive” interviews, has been impeccable. The media just laps it up. Audiences just can’t turn away. Ratings go up, as the print media breathlessly report what their radio and TV colleagues have heard, although it is almost always the same thing.
The situation has become so predictable, and so flattering to the man who comes here primarily to wallow in the publicity circus, that several journalists and organizations even issued a handbook this year about how to interview this fellow. It had no appreciable effect. Ahmadinejad loves attention, and nowhere can he get so much so fast as in New York.
Asking him tough questions is pointless. When he can’t turn the question around, when he can’t slip around it to score a point, he simply lies. Over and over and over. The website Tehran Bureau (in association with PBS Frontline) assembled a list of the most egregious recent examples:
”No newspaper in Iran has been closed for criticizing me and my government”
”Iran is the freest country in the world”
”The judiciary is completely independent in Iran”
”Sanctions are not important”
”No one has been imprisoned for taking part in demonstrations”
”No one is tortured in Iran”
”Our critics and competitors are freely active in Iran”
It is not Western propagandists who dismiss these statements as fabrications. These statements contradict what every politically aware person and institution in Iran knows is true. Newspapers in Iran try to report the truth, but they are immediately closed. Prisoners describe their false arrests and torture in testimony sometimes directly to the Supreme Leader. No one denies it, but no one dares act on the knowledge.
Last year, after having previously spent some nine hours with Iran’s president in various settings over a period of years, I said that I would not attend such a meeting again, even if invited. (To the surprise of absolutely no one, I have had no invitation since.) I had listened to Ahmadinejad in private sessions for three years, and I had even had a chance for a direct back-and-forth. I came away convinced that his interest was purely in the publicity he generated. Given the choice between a thoughtful and constructive response to a serious question, versus the opportunity for a verbal zinger, there was no contest.
My meetings with him convinced me that Ahmadinejad sees himself as a peacemaker who is taking every possible step to bridge the gap between the godless West and Iran’s holy government. But this self-image is in conflict with the constant need for attention and the underlying belief that, in any case, the Mahdi will soon return and sort these things out without human help. So messages veer back and forth at a dizzying rate.
If you really want to understand why Ahmadinejad behaves the way he does, and how he can invent new facts to suit his every impulse, you really needn’t look very far afield. Think of Sarah Palin claiming that she could keep an eye on Russia from her Alaska home or that health reform would result in “death panels.” These claims were roundly ridiculed as fantasy, but she has never withdrawn them and they have done nothing to dent her popularity. It was, after all, members of the George W. Bush administration who scorned those living in a “reality-based” world; on the contrary, they believed, they would create their own reality.
Ahmadinejad, like some other leaders, has constructed an alternative universe based on a vision of what his own country and the world should be. That vision is attractive to the very many people who are unhappy with the ways things actually are.
So when Ahmadinejad wants to condemn the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, he declares that the original event that set these interventions in motion – the 9/11 attack – was a fraud perpetrated by the Americans on themselves. The fact that Osama Bin Laden has proudly claimed credit for the attack is simply irrelevant. The myth fits into the ideal political universe of Ahmadinejad (and others – not just in Iran) who prefer to see all unpleasantness in the Middle East as the perfidious work of outsiders, especially the West.
This hugely complicates any effort of Ahmadinejad or other members of the Iranian regime to pursue a consistent and pragmatic diplomatic path. However, it preserves their revolutionary image with a broad swath of humanity. It also helps explain why Obama’s offer of an outstretched hand – which does not fit in this alternative universe – was not easily accepted.
In fact-checking Ahmadinejad and others who have their own idealized political agenda, one should never forget that the “reality-based” universe is in fact a minority dwelling place.