Lightweight anchor
Political philosopher Brian Williams of NBC went to Teheran. Here he describes his impressions of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he apparently thinks is all bluster:
He’s a Ph.D. He’s the former mayor of Tehran. He’s got an election next year, and, after all, at the end of the day, he’s a politician. And he may very well know that the religious folks who, some would argue, more in charge than he is, have perhaps decided that embracing the West, the US, while these talks are going on in Geneva, wouldn’t be a bad idea. You enter that country and you see what sanctions do. You see that the city streets remind you of a cross between Havana and Baghdad. Kind of a used-to-be Eastern Bloc nation that hasn’t had a cent invested in years…
we have very little human intelligence in Iran. And it was clear he had a message to impart. It was clear from the moment we were picked up at the airport when we learned where the interview was going to be. Ten minutes after he walked out I was on the Today show from his courtyard: absolutely unheard of…
He’s playing to his base like a politician in Cleveland. You can go through the transcript, and he, you were joking, he says all but “death to America.” At one point he said to me, and I’m paraphrasing very loosely, the atomic bomb is so 20th-century…
First time I go to Russia, I realize Tom Friedman’s theory, that the dirty little secret was they couldn’t build a light-bulb back during those years we were so worried about them. First time, I was in Saddam’s palace two days after the invasion. Went to drink from a faucet in his bathroom and realized the gold sink was paint, and the underside was just black metal. And that’s a perfect metaphor for so much of what these rulers build up. So maybe you could argue that a military-industrial complex depends on having enemies.
Maybe Williams is right and Mr. Ahmadinejad is a career pol who is playing to his base with elections coming up. That’s one possibility of course. But what if the President of Iran is something else entirely?