The Ahmadinejad show

He came, he spoke, he flopped.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches at Columbia University and the United Nations this week were as outrageous and as disturbing as ever. The attention his Columbia speech received, however, proved the university correct in its decision (which this page supported) to invite the Iranian leader to have his say. Unfortunately, his host failed to understand that it is far more useful to listen to one’s enemies than to insult them. And the jibes were hardly necessary. By allowing Ahmadinejad to elaborate on his ludicrous views on homosexuality, his shifting equivocations about the Holocaust, his aspiration to lead a new nonaligned bloc united in anti-American animus and his messianic religious views, the university and the United Nations did the world a service by helping us understand -- insofar as the rambling and bewildering remarks could be understood -- the true nature of the Iranian regime.

And what did Ahmadinejad get from the visit? A world-class collection of epithets: “cruel dictator,” “astonishingly uneducated,” “evil weasel” and “fruitbat,” just for starters. That was all viscerally satisfying, but it may be having just the result that Ahmadinejad had hoped for -- shoring up support among those Iranian nationalists who find in the foreign derision of their president vindication of their anti-Western views. At least that’s the spin in the state-controlled Iranian media, suggesting that Ahmadinejad believes he benefits from Yankee hostility.

Of course, though he glibly denied it, Ahmadinejad has been cracking down on the independent media. Reporters Without Borders says 73 journalists have been arrested and 20 news organizations have been censored in the last year alone. So it is unclear whether ordinary Iranians might question whether their not-so-freely elected president is an international embarrassment -- or a menace to their own national interests.

But as the ruckus recedes, the question remains: How much does Ahmadinejad matter? The answer depends on just one thing: To what extent are his views shared by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who really calls the shots in Iran? Ahmadinejad is reported to enjoy the supreme leader’s full support. Certainly Khamenei is as rhetorically anti-American and mistrustful of Western intentions as his protege. Yet some see signs -- in Iran’s dealings with the International Atomic Energy Agency and in the recent release of four Iranian Americans held in Tehran, among other moves -- that the quiet Khamenei may be less eager than the flamboyant Ahmadinejad to provoke a confrontation with the West.

Nearly 30 years after its revolution, Iran remains ideologically inimical to the United States. That makes it all the more vital that other world powers, notably Iran’s accommodating trading partners -- China, Russia, Germany -- as well as its nervous neighbors be willing through peaceful economic means to raise the costs to Khamenei of continuing Iran’s nuclear defiance.