http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX2yNZ3-Rzo

Obviously the guy is a fool for some of his past statements, but what’s foolish about asking for a debate?

Should The chairman of NASA hold a televised debate with Alex Jones about whether the 1969 moon landing was staged? Would the surgeon General have a debate with Gary Null on whether drinking urine cures cancer? Would you debate a gorilla on the value of eating your own shit?

Why would you even think it worthy to legitimize Ahmadinajad’s position on the global stage for the president to have a debate with him? The debate is over, the jury is out. The Iranian regime is illegitimate, tyrannical and run by terrorists. Their goals in the region are unacceptable and they have to stop what they are doing.

A highly touted presidential summit where Obama and Ahmadinajad shake hands amidst the crackling of press core flash bulbs achieves about as much anyway. I wonder if Obama would adorn a Kufi as Ahmadinajad gives him a tour of that Shrine in Qom where the 12th Imam is believed to be hiding for 1000 years, all while they sip tea and the paparazzi follow them. This type of thing is quite common during presidential summits, no?

Nobody gets killed when two sides talk.

Tell that to the Czechs of the Sudetenland, or the Tutsis of Rawanda, or the ethnic Albanians of Serbia, or the Kurds, or the Darfurians. But I digress, those comparisons aren’t necessarily applicable here. Unless of course, that all this legitimizing and talking and debating merely buys time whereby the Iranians can produce enough Uranium to develop a bomb which is smuggled via Syria to Hezbollah. Then a lot of people get killed.

Negotiation is the backbone of every successful foreign policy.
Nobody gets killed when two sides talk. However, it is rare to find a problem successfully negotiated publicly. Can you imagine Krushchev and Kennedy debating the Cuban Missile Crisis? Yes, both sides publicly played it out on the world stage, but the solutions were negotiated in secret. One of the first rules in trying to get an adversary to change a position is not to back him or her into an embarassing situation. Debates are all about that.

No one can seriously think that putting John McCain, Barack Obama and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a town hall meeting or before a George Stephanopolus moderated debate is going to solve anything. This would be a circus. It would not solve the problems any better than the Bush administrations refusal to talk to Iranian leaders.

A debate would play to the audience with grandstanding and theatrics. It is better to get serious and try to solve the real problems.

MDG is right. We don’t look especially good if the best we can do is say “everyone look and laugh.” Obviously the guy is a fool for some of his past statements, but what’s foolish about asking for a debate? It’s actually pretty savvy, because if we are so sure he’s wrong about everything, why isn;t a debate an opportunity?

The answer of course is that a debate is really just a political theater game, and this guy has very good skills. In a widely telvised debate, this guy would score points by getting lots of folks to say ” yeah, home come…. .”

The problems for US in this region are multiple. We can’t really explain our rationale for why we get to have nukes but no one else is allowed to join the club. Unless we claim singular virtue. That’s a tough sell, and folks tend to take offense at it.

They are the victims because they are a poor, developing country of exotic people who are in conflict with rich, capitalist Americans and Jews.

All we need is an educated aristocrat like Barack Obama to directly talk to Ahmadinajad, and through his eloquent pedagogery, he will naturally cause these “noble savages” to see the folly of their ways and Ahmadinajad will instantly dispose of his apocalyptic religious rhetoric, or”opiate of the masses,” and magically abandon all of his geopolitical ambitions.