ATLANTA — In an interview before his speech to the UN General Assembly, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad said that he wants President Barack Obama and the United States to see him as their friend. With friends like this ...
And Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, in his General Assembly speech and speaking in the imperial plural, declared such affection for Obama that he said he considers the president "our son." Obama hasn't rushed to sign up for the adoption.
The opening, ministerial session of the General Assembly, with some 100 heads of state and government present for photo ops and sometimes even to make a point, is always a time when the cages are flung open and the critters take over the zoo.
Gaddafi unleashed a rant that ran for 90 minutes and ricocheted among topics like a manic pinball, by turns heaping contempt on the United Nations, implying that Israel was behind the assassination of President Kennedy and charging that the H1N1 virus is a military or corporate biological weapon that jumped the lab.
Gaddafi has to be watched. He has shown in the past he can cause mischief and worse beyond his weight class, but for now he is pretty much just a bore and a loon. Ahmadinejad is another matter altogether.
Iran recently announced that is testing a newly developed generation of centrifuges that, if they prove out and come on line, would double or even triple the speed at which that country could enrich uranium.
Tehran insists it is only enriching uranium to the low levels that are all that is needed to produce energy, but Western and Israeli intelligence agencies think otherwise. Iran has refused to place its program under the oversight of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the IAEA says suspicions that Iran is working toward, and nearing, nuclear weapon production are credible even though unverified.
A nuclear-armed Iran would make an already unstable Middle East more unstable and dangerous yet, and create a provocation to still more nuclear proliferation, all the more so if North KoreaAhmadinejad posed at the UN podium as the enemy of all weapons nuclear and urged their purging from the Earth, substituting showoff grandiosity for serious engagement with the palpable present.
Crunch time nears even so. Iran is to meet Oct. 1 with representatives of six major powers, Washington included. The tentative good news to come from the UN session is that — keep your fingers crossed — Russia and China may finally be ready to join in serious sanctions against Tehran as a last-chance means to drive its nuclear program into IAEA bounds.
Beijing and Moscow have always trimmed and dodged in the past, letting Iran escape the economic and political isolation that neither its weak economy nor its tempest-tossed regime is in a position to handle well or perhaps even to survive.
Ahmadinejad in the run-up to his UN appearance indulged himself in yet another outburst of Holocaust denial, a deeply annoying obsession to say the least. Iran's president may be a fool but he will make fools if the six convening nations, too, if they don't at last combine against Iran's nuclear outlawry with full-force sanctions.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn(at)earthlink.net.
