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I Am All For Colloquy . . .

Posted by Pejman Yousefzadeh on Thu Sep 21, 2006 at 02:15:56 PM EST

But events like this one are pretty much a waste of time except insofar as they show that we are dealing with a dishonest interlocutor in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. To call Ahmadinejad "a master of counterpunch, deception, circumlocution" is quite too much as well. No one deserves praise for not being able to give straight answers to questions and for trying desperately to slip out of difficult situations. Opportunities for follow-up questions could and should have been given to nail down Ahmadinejad's answers and to force him to commit to a position. Barring that, people should have been free to call his act what it was; a fraud.

UPDATE: I suppose that I should clarify. To be sure, I think that Ahmadinejad is a skilled politician and enjoys the verbal give-and-take. But part of the advantage that he has is that he deals with people who are just horrible at engaging in repartee with him. See, for example, this transcript of Mike Wallace's interview with Ahmadinejad and ask yourself what Wallace might have been thinking on some of the questions that he asked. The exchange regarding Ahmadinejad's sartorial choices was especially bizarre. By contrast, when you have an interview where the interviewer is relentlessly tough on Ahmadinejad, the latter finds it much, much harder to unleash his standard propaganda points. The Council on Foreign Relations--and Mike Wallace--should have taken lessons from Der Spiegel.

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