"It is for this reason that Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University on Monday is so vital. He will be challenged by students who will exercise their right to free speech in the way that their counterparts in Iran cannot. They will question his absurd ideological views that the Holocaust never occurred and that Israel should be wiped off the planet. They will force him to account for Iran's burgeoning nuclear program, interference with American efforts in Iraq, and ongoing support of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah. Most importantly, they will be given the opportunity to impugn Ahmadinejad's abhorrent oppression of the Iranian people, disputing the rationality of Iran's misogynist, homophobic, and other malicious laws. In short, Columbia students will get to demand answers to questions that the Iranians cannot so much as utter publicly."

I think's what a lot of people are missing in arguing that he has no place coming here. Let's use his visit to promote the ideals we would like to see in the world.

So, Western powers did "meddle" in Iran's affairs with a heavy hand in the disposal of one of its most popular democratic leaders, which led to the autocratic rule of the Shah, which led to the miserable Islamic revolution and government that the world is stuck with now.

I'll let Madeline Albright finish off the point:

In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.

And this isn't a "blame America" argument. There's plenty of causes -- mostly from Iranians themselves.  But we do need to assess our own actions and see whether we're helping our hurting our own interests in the long term.  History shows that the decision to remove Mossadeq was a short-term gain but might have been a long-term disaster.

Go on and show me that I'm wrong.

If you really want to come down on a country which oppresses women you should talk about India. I guess since they don't have any oil and they DO have a bomb we don't need to demonized them.

I do think our attempts to control the governments of Iran over the years, including our support of Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, have created a blowback of a somewhat fundamentalist regime. Bush and the Iranian president are using the same tactics and playing the same game. Its an old game and anyone can play it, but I would be cautious in identifying the whole society with its leaders. If you do that you could say we in America are all fundamentalist extremists because of all the opinions on TV (Fox) and opinions coming from the Bush administration.

And don't forget we have people here who put nooses on trees if black kids stand under them. Other countries could point to that and condemn the whole country. However, if one is looking for a convenient bad guy then demonizing a whole country works well especially if you intend to bomb them.

But they are still considered second-class citizens.  They are not "encouraged" to wear scarves, they are required (forced) to wear chadors, which cover their whole head including their hair. This is required by law.

The enforcement of the religious law has grown lenient in Tehran and other large urban areas.  And there is a large, hip youth culture that has distanced itself from the religious revolution that took place in Iran in the 1970s.  Further, many Iranians, young and old, support the reform party of Khatami.

But the ayatollahs can, and do, pull in the string sharply every so often and reassert their authority. 

The Iranian people no longer support the extremists, except among the poor and uneducated in the rural areas.  But in the late 1970s and throughout the 80s that wasn't the case.  When they chanted "death to America," they meant it.  And laws curtailing women's freedom, including wearing a much more severe and uncomfortable chador, were enforced by religious police, and punishment for infractions was often swift and severe. Women were publicly beaten for a few strands of hair showing.

Thankfully, that has changed.  But it has changed more because of liberalization of the cities and by informal custom.  Again, the ayatollahs can reel the population back in when they choose. 

The freedoms that women enjoy there are precarious, subject to change at the whim of religious leaders and the political climate. That freedom is also relative.  Compared to women in Arab countries with fundamentalist governments, the Persian women of Iran are relatively free.  But compared to women throughout most of the West, their position is far from ideal. I would guess that you, like me, would not necessarily want to live under the Iranian regime.  And many of those women would prefer more reform too.

And it's not like I'm saying the U.S. should not look out for it's own interests.  But it should learn from its past mistakes -- working to depose democratically elected leaders in favor of despots didn't work in this case.  And we should learn from the after effects of any actions -- in this case, stunting the political development of this country back then quite likely led to the stunted political development we face now.

"The terrible atrocities of the Holocaust are historical facts, and their denial is offensive and outrageous," Obama's written remarks say. "We know that the most powerful way to confront the statements of President Ahmadinejad is to shine the light of truth on his hateful lies . . . Let President Ahmadinejad learn, here in America, that we are united in rejecting Iran's support for terrorism, its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and his comments which offend Israel, Jews, and all people of goodwill."

Exactly right, thank you Barack Obama!

"If I were the president of a university, I would not have invited him, but I did not express an opinion about the decision made by Columbia," Clinton said. "Obviously I was very much against his desire to go to ground zero. I thought that was absolutely out of bounds and unacceptable and thankfully it was not permitted."

He wants to go to Ground Zero? Fantastic.  Maybe he can learn something about the loss that America experienced on that day.  In any event, he should be as free as any other American to do the same.  Would that we could say the same about any other Iranian.

Democratic candidate John Edwards said Monday of such statements: "I find all those things abhorrent." He added, "I think this is for Columbia to decide whether they want a man like this to speak at their university."

The best response to him?  Was the mocking laughter of the Columbia students in response to the question about the execution of gay Iranians.

The comment about JRE, however, is trollish. I'm not even a JRE supporter, but "Gonadi Absentus" invective for Edwards saying what he said, and claiming that Edwards' quote is somehow an 'unprincipled, suck-up position' is trollish on a site dedicated to Democratic Party politics in Virginia. I rarely use the troll-rating, but there's no policy that I can't use it when I feel engaging with said person is a waste of time.

So, that's my explanation.

If you think I owe something substantive to this discussion to warrant calling someone else out as a troll, here goes:

I disagree with Lowell on the semantics of all this, but I've had at least one discussion with him on this issue in the past year in a separate thread, and I respect his perspective. He has a deeper expertise in the Middle East as a whole than I do, and I learn alot from him on a regular basis. Still, I don't think it's helpful in the current national climate to be calling Ahmadinejad evil or trying to brand him/Iran as an enemy of the United States. Too much of that going down, frankly, with too many unstable persons on our side still holding the levers of power and trying to exploit those fears for bad purposes.

Ahmadinejad is mostly a figurehead, a purposefully ignorant dunce that is digustingly anti-Semitic. He holds little real power in the country, and is a walking strawman, but I'm not convinced he's a madman, just vainglorious. The best way to deal with people like him is to let them speak and then vigorously refute their nonsense with the truth and with our ideas. The actions of Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes, Bollinger's ridiculous opening screed, and the actions of various NYC  and NY state politicians have unfortunately given  Ahmadinejad much more credit than he deserves. Like it or not, he is the quasi-elected head of state of a country we ought to be negotiating with and trying not to start a war with.

When did American become so insecure that we can't let a clown like Ahmadinejad give a speech, visit a terrorism memorial? Iran had zero to do with 9/11, and maybe his gesture was intended to be an olive branch toward better relations, or a chance for him to begin to understand our motivations/wounds. If we persist in letting our fears rule us, and painting the whole Muslim world as terrorists, the worse angels of our nature are going to bring us a very unhappy 21st century.

In any event, I'm in complete agreement with your last three paragraphs.  I think that makes us a pretty small minority, at the moment.

George Bush's belligerence contributed to the election of Ahmadinejad. During his campaign for president, when he was mayor, he used GWB as his rallying cry. All he did was to remind Iranian voters that Bush included Iran among the "Axis of Evil". As Bush attacked Iraq, Ahmadinejad won the election by pointing out that America would probably attack Iran next.

So, I see his election as a direct result of Bush's unnecessary bellicosity.

Mossadegh was a democratically elected, progressive, educated, Iranian nationalist who was overthrown in 1953 by American and British intelligence because he was about to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which was then controlled by British Petroleum.

Reza Shah, overthrown in the Iranian Revolution, was not a royal by lineage, but the son of an Iranian sergeant who finagled his way up through the ranks with the aid of British military intelligence, eventually seizing the throne as the first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty.

In his later years, Reza Shah was seen by the culturally conservative, poor Iranian masses as a corrupt, decadent, supposedly homosexual, effete, Western wannabe who oppressed the forces of traditional Islam and who was a spendthrift who spent fortunes on palaces for himself and glittery infrastucture, most of which were constructed for huge sums by American contractors like Bechtel.  A large resident community of American government and military personnel and American contractors lived ostentatiously in Iran, further provoking the masses of Iranian poor.

The U.S. was seen as the puppeteer of the Western-oriented Shah.  The CIA was deeply involved with the Savak, the Shah's secret police, which killed and tortured Shia fundamentalists who opposed the Shah.  Savak was responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances. 

When the forces of the Iranian Revolution proved unstoppable, the Shah fled.  Sick, he was allowed into the U.S. to seek medical treatment by President Carter and it was this specific act which triggered the attack by radical Iranian students (including, it's claimed, Ahmadinejad) on the U.S. Embassy and the seizing of American diplomats as hostages.

Civilian Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down in 1988 by the guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes who thought, mistakenly, that were being attacked by an Iranian fighter jet.  All 290 passengers and crew were killed, including 38 non-Iranians and 66 children.  The U.S. government never even apologised, though we paid $ 30 million in compensation. The crew of the Vincennes were awarded combat-action ribbons for this horror. 

Iran is the only Shia Muslim state.  Iranians are Persians, not Arabs.  Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban were bitter enemies of Iran - Wahabi Sunni fundamentalists consider Shia to be apostates deserving of death.  Taliban troops with some involvement by al-Qaeda fighters slaughtered not only hundreds, if not thousands of the Afghan Shia minority Hazara, but Iranian diplomats in Afghanistan.

Given their own adversarial relationship with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Shia Iran, immediately after 9/11, offered to provide the U.S. unrivaled intelligence assets within Afghanistan.  This unique opportunity to exploit the enemy of my enemy is my friend was spurned by the Bush regime.

It may be a matter of hair-splitting semantics and the nuances of Farsi-English translation whether or not Ahmadinejad truly said that Israel should be wiped out.  Some say he said, in Farsi, that Zionist Israel should be erased from a map of the Middle East, meaning, to be generous, that he was saying that the Jewish nation of Israel should be replaced with a non-Jewish state.

As to whether or not there is any substance to the boy-who-cried-wolf Bush regime charges that Iran is bent on acquiring nuclear weapons, it might be wise to consider the realpolitik situation from the Iranian point-of-view.  Both the terrorist state of North Korea, which has committed crimes against its own people similar to Saddam's oppression of Iraqis, and Pakistan, which actively supported the Taliban, gave refuge to Osama bin Laden and which harbored 9/11 plotters, have nuclear weapons.  Neither was invaded by the U.S., but Iraq, which had no wmd and no involvement at all in 9/11, was.  Clearly, possessing nuclear weapons, whether real or as a poker bluff, is a deterrent to a U.S. invasion.

Further, who is threatening whom?  The U.S., which has a history of using nuclear weapons as well as intervening in Iran, has two carrier groups armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, cruising just off Iranian territorial waters.  Less than nine hundred miles west of Iran is Israel, armed with 500+ nuclear weapons and a history of conducting preemptive strikes.  Both U.S. and Israeli government officials and public figures have overtly threatened Iran with attack.

It is believed that U.S. special ops troops have been intermittantly operating in small numbers in southeastern Iran, where there is a small Iranian Sunni minority and in northeastern Iran, where there is a mostly Sunni ethnic Kurdish minority.  This may or may not predate the more recent U.S. charges of Iran supporting and supplying Shia militia in Iraq.  Per the hoary proverb, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

In sum, Ahmadinejad and the Iranian religious right wing, the Iranian military and the Iranian military-industrial complex need its American counterparts to preserve its hold on power.  And vice versa.

This guy may be crazy and evil, but he has more cajones than the Chimp/Cheney's

Most Iranians are pretty moderate, and open to western ideals. Don't confuse Tehran with LA but from what I hear its more open than most in the media would have you believe. The government organizes rallies where a small group chants "death to america", and this is what the camera films. When the truth is most Iranians dont outright hate americans.

If you got brain in your head, you will think where Holocaust happened and who did, who should be called Idiot ? It was Muslims who sheared their lands with Jews not you (Americans, Britons or Germans) if holocaust happened in Germany why don't you get their lands and give to Jews to do justice why Muslims lost their life at their won home land?

IF YOU REALY BELIEVE IN FREE SPEECH COME AND ANSWER AND FIND THE ANSWER FOR YOUR SELF AS WELL ? WE SHOULD CALL YOU UNEDUCATED AIL MANNER ?
I AM SORRY BUT YOUR THOUGHTS MADE ME TO BE LIKE YOU AND TALK WITH YOU IN UR WON LANGUAGE?