Ahmadinejad, Monica Lewinsky redux?

Some Muslim readers were taken aback by my blunt dismissal of Ahmadinejad as an "ass" who betrayed the Palestinian cause at the UN conference on racism. If you're still on the fence, take a look at this analysis from peole at always insightful IPS News Service who know far more than I. They seem to concur with every concern that I raised.

MIDEAST: Iran Hands Israel a Gift

JERUSALEM, Apr 22 (IPS) – Just when it seemed that the international community was gearing itself up to put pressure on the new Israel government to engage the Arab world and the Palestinian Authority seriously on peace, Iran's president hijacked the moment. But, in again lashing out against Israel, he handed the Israeli prime minister a whip of his own with which to question the merit of dialogue with Iran which the Obama Administration has been promoting.

Only last week, in his latest round of talks with Israeli and Arab leaders, special U.S. presidential envoy Senator George Mitchell had suggested a linkage between solving the issue of Iran's nuclear quest and the need for Israel to remain committed to a two-state solution with the Palestinians. To which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had responded with a linkage of his own – a negative linkage: that renewal of negotiations with the Palestinians be conditional on removal of the Iranian nuclear threat.

[…]

President Ahmadinejad's bluntness could now prove the saving grace for a recalcitrant Netanyahu and a real blow for the Obama strategy-in-the- making. In fact, he seems to have put the U.S. President initiative in a double-barrelled bind: the State Department had to condemn the Ahmadinejad statements in Geneva at the very time it was reaffirming the U.S. commitment for dialogue with Iran.

More pointedly, Mitchell's attempt to link forceful progress towards resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the overall Israeli- Arab conflict, with a firm policy that will curb Iran's nuclear ambitions could well be seriously hamstrung. The Iranian President may even have given renewed life to the counter Israeli insistence that before the world should expect Israel to move on Palestine, it must first deal convincingly with Iran.

Emphasis added.

In other words, Ahmadinejad is either a political dunce of the first order or he doesn't really care about these causes. (Or perhaps a bit of the two, which seems most likely to me.)

Object as much as you like to this reality, but in the hyper-visual mass media environment in which all modern political debates play out today, perception is almost as important as reality. Facts play a role, but as a famous media observer once said the medium is the message. In the case of the Middle East, I think this is doubly true of the average Western media consumer, who has no firsthand knowledge of the region, it's history and its issues. Then there's Iran's huge (and half self-inflicted) image problem, the accumulated weight of the nearly 3 decades of distrust, fear and regular demonization of post-Revolutionary Iran in Western societies, especially America. With all the ignorance and negative associations, Iran really needs good PR, or at least normal PR.

Iran wants the international community to relax about its uranium enrichment efforts.Iran wants 'constructive' talks on nuclear program – washingtonpost.com

Iran

welcomes a "constructive" dialogue with world powers over its nuclear
program _ but insisted that it won't halt its uranium enrichment
activities, the official IRNA news agency reported Wednesday.

That's not very likely with Iran being represented so bizarrely on the world stage. Such antics don't exactly inspire confidence.

Which is why you could be forgiven for wondering whether Ahmadinejad wasn't a Mossad android.* His crude bluster is straight out of Central Casting in its incredible geopolitical tone-deafness. The guy is Bibi's best friend, hasbara made flesh.

I wonder if Ahmadinejad is going to be the second incarnation of Monica Lewinsky when it comes to the Middle East peace process. Many argue that the controversy involving her and Bill Clinton (quite unfairly named after her) was a critical factor in taking the wind out of the sails of US Mideast peace mediation during Bill Clinton's second term (and Binyamin Netanyahu's first as Israeli Prime Minister). At the time, observers from across the political spectrum were urging Clinton to get tough with his Israeli counterpart–an inverate Arab-baiting hardliner, whose inflammatory rhetoric many think contributed to Yitzchak Rabin's assassination in 1995–but then the Lewinsky scandal reached a fever pitch in 1998 and Clinton completely withdrew from the peace process as he struggled for political survival.

See the report below by J.J. Goldberg from a decade ago for a sense of how this media circus miraculously shielded Netanyahu from being held accountable for his willful sabotaging of the peace process. (Sound familiar?)

Will Ahmadinejad with his idiotic and odious antics be Obama's "blue dress"? Will Ahmadinejad likewise short-circuit the peace process?

I think it's a very real possibility. This guy's an unmitigated disaster who taints everything he touches.

The really scary thing is that he's not going anywhere. He's young and extremely visible. No matter how much he hurts Iran's international image, the Iranian religious leadership's will not hold him accountable since his actions ultimately strengthen their hold on society by further isolating it from the international community. And he'll probably always find appreciative and supportive audiences in Iranian right so long as this cold war of mutual satanization between America and Iran drags on.

The only way to defeat him is to get serious about ending the conflicts that he feeds off of. Problem is, a lot of American politicians feed off it, too.

How Monica Lewinsky and her dress destroyed the Middle East Peace Accords

WASHINGTON — Sitting in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel here, the famously quick- tongued Yossi Beilin seemed, for once, almost at a loss for words. What, after all, do Israeli socialists know about cocktail dresses?

One thing, it turns out: that they distract Washington's attention from urgent problems around the world.

"It's simply surreal," said Dr. Beilin, a leader of Israel's opposition Labor Party.

"To think that the greatest power on earth is out of commission because of Monica Lewinsky's dress — it's one of the most surreal episodes in history."

Last January, when the world first learned of Ms. Lewinsky, the presidential sex scandal triggered a sudden mood swing in U.S.-Israel relations. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had just landed in Washington, expecting to have Bill Clinton read him the riot act for what the Administration saw as foot-dragging on the peace process.

Enter Ms. Lewinsky, and Mr. Clinton was suddenly preoccupied. Mr. Netanyahu had an unexpectedly placid visit and returned to Israel a happy man.

Seven months later, Dr. Beilin was in Washington as part of a four-member delegation of Labour Party leaders. Led by party chairman Ehud Barak, they came in hopes of burnishing their image as a viable alternative to Mr. Netanyahu.

Their prospects seemed bright on the eve of departure. The Knesset had taken a key step towards dissolving itself and calling new elections, handing Mr. Netanyahu one of the worst political reverses of his tenure.

"That means we're here as a group that could come to power in the near future," Dr. Beilin maintained.

To their dismay, they arrived to find that President Clinton, too, had just been handed one of the worst political reverses of his tenure: Ms. Lewinsky's decision to testify about the alleged affair and to hand over a certain cocktail dress. Nobody in Washington was talking about anything else.

* For the record, I don't believe that the Mossad has androids. (At times the wooden Rabin made me wonder, though, but that's a different matter.)

If they're smart, though–and it's pretty well established that they are–they have obtained Ahmadinejad's DNA and are lovingly cloning him in one of those Tel Aviv hi-tech startups for deployment throughout the Middle East and Islamic world in a generation. A couple more leaders of his caliber and the international community will probably give Israel carte blanche to nuke the whole region.