It was just over two years ago that Barack Obama,then the junior senator from Illinois with aspirations to the presidency,famously pronounced,that he would be willing to hold direct talks,without preconditions,with the president of Iran. This week,President Obama will have the chance to do just that,when Irans fiery,Israel-bashing,legitimacy-challenged president,Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,joins Obama and other world leaders to speak at the first United Nations General Assembly in the new kinder,gentler,Barack Obama era. And guess what? Administration officials will be doing everything in their power to make sure the two dont get within spitting distance of each other. Youve got to get the Secret Service to put stumbling blocks in the way, said Ray Takeyh,until last month a senior adviser for Iran at the State Department. Youve got to quarantine that off. Youve got to make sure to avoid any kind of chance encounter with Ahmadinejad. A senior White House official was equally adamant. Having Ahmadinejad meet Obama thats just not going to happen, he said. You saw the events of the Iranian election and its aftermath. Theres a nuclear reality that has to be dealt with,its hard not to be affected by what we saw. Translation: after watching Iranian protestors be brutalised on the streets of Tehran by government forces making sure that Ahmadinejad was retained as president,the last place Obama wants to be caught is anywhere near the Iranian leader. Even the barest handshake between the Wests most popular political figure and one of its most reviled political foes could deflate Irans nascent political opposition,give conservative hawks in the United States even more to lambast the president for,and send Israel over the edge. Ahmadinejad may have other ideas since he has little to lose and everything to gain by being a gate-crasher at Obamas photo op. Ahmadinejad took another swipe at Israel last Friday,telling a rally in Tehran that the Holocaust was a myth. The White House spokesman,Robert Gibbs,quickly condemned the remarks as vicious lies. The United States has agreed to nuclear talks with Iran,Europe,Russia and China in October,but those are lower-level talks. And few people think those talks will go anywhere anyway. So,for the grand show to take place in New York this week,expect a President Obama whose behaviour toward Iran will resemble that of his predecessor,George W. Bush. Which may seem,at first,a bit curious. Just last week,Obama separated himself from one of President Bushs muscular foreign policy initiatives when he abandoned the effort to put missile interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic. The administration said it was a move that would allow placement of the interceptors closer to the real danger,Iran,and prompt Russia to cooperate more closely in containing the nuclear ambitions of you guessed it Ahmadinejad and the mullahs in Tehran. Which was also a goal of Bush. Obama and Ahmadinejad are scheduled to address the UN General Assembly on Wednesday. When Bush addressed the General Assembly in September 2007,Ahmadinejad sat in the audience and listened,without outward reaction,as the American president slammed Iran as part of his litany of brutal regimes that should be confronted. When Ahmadinejad delivered his rambling and defiant 40-minute speech a few hours later,the United States delegation pointedly left the hall. Ouch. This time,while Obama probably wont use language as strong as Bush used he has,after all,tried in recent months to extend his unclenched fist,sending letters to Irans supreme leader and wishing the regime a Happy Nowruz and the like. But dont expect him to sit in the hall and listen to Ahmadinejad. I dont think even Susan will be there, said Takeyh,now at the Council on Foreign Relations. He was referring to Susan E. Rice,the United States ambassador to the United Nations. But Ahmadinejad,Takeyh said,will probably be in the audience when President Obama speaks. Government-run Iranian news media outlets have hinted that there may be a meeting between the two presidents,which a White House official said had zero chance of being true. Ahmadinejad is expected to talk a lot in New York about nuclear apartheid,and how the West thinks it can have nuclear weapons and no one else can,and to present himself as a leader who speaks for the developing world. In that context,standing next to the leader of the developed world could do him a lot of good back home. And for all of the talk of engagement,doing Ahmadinejad a lot of good back home is the last thing the White House wants.
