Who sees red

Let8217;s thank Hugo Chavez for this. It took all his delusional eloquence at the UN General Assembly this week to sort out the current band of America-baiters. For one, the Venezuelan president8217;s riveting address actually made his friend and Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appear restrained and reasoned. But beyond personality comparisons, in the space of 24 hours the two leaders added clarity about the kind of inter-nation dialogues that must take place, dialogues led by the US by virtue of its power and its capacity to provoke diverse malcontents.

Chavez, for all the applause he won, betrayed the irrelevance of his ideological polemic by promoting the coca-cause of his latest protege, Bolivia8217;s Evo Morales, and dreaming up alternative UNs headquartered in South America. Far away, presumably, from the sulphurous stench of the devil, George W. Bush, Ahmadinejad is an inadequate representative of a whole spectrum of Islamic opinion that the rest of the world must learn to engage with. At the UN, his silence on the Holocaust was conspicuous, but his critique of the organisation carried resonance from different parts of the world. He was critical of a global order which gave the power of veto to just five. And while remaining in flimsy denial of his country8217;s advanced nuclear programme, he did not resort to a Chavez-like rejection of the IAEA8217;s treaty-enforcement mechanisms.

Ahmadinejad8217;s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, once called for a dialogue of civilisations. The grandness of the formulation is intimidating, especially with terrorism and war in the intervening years having heightened distrust between large sections of the Muslim world and the West. Ahmedinejad8217;s obvious exertion to appear to be part of the dialogue, however, gives hope that the dialogue can be broadbased beyond the 8220;moderates8221; Bush spoke of so yearningly in his address. To retrieve global peace and trust, nothing less will do. Chavez can meanwhile be left alone to annotate Chomsky8217;s books.