“This week, America hosted a visiting head of state – an occasion which is usually cause for diplomatic formalities and a fair amount of pomp.  Not so when the visitor is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran.  Ahmadinejad’s visit was more an occasion for disbelief and head-shaking, as we experienced firsthand this strange leader and his assumptions about the free world.

On the surface were reports of Ahmadinejad’s absurd past denials of the Holocaust, his defense of an aggressive and illegal nuclear program, and his dodges on questions about human rights abuses in Iran.  He asked to visit Ground Zero at the World Trade Center in New York City to pay his respects, an insincere request which was seen through and denied.  Ahmadinejad, true to form, was cavalier and uncomprehendingly aloof during his entire stay.  The president of Columbia University in New York City, which hosted Ahmadinejad on Monday, said that, by visiting, Ahmadinejad showed he was either “brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.”

My guess is the latter.

America is the land of opportunity, and Ahmadinejad set out to exploit as many opportunities as he could.

He told audiences that Iran’s women are the freest in the world.

He claimed that there are no homosexuals in Iran.

He said, again, that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful, energy-related purposes.

Behind those bombastic statements are verifiable contradictions, such as the fact that, under Ahmadinejad’s Iranian law, women count for one half of a citizen compared to men. 
 
Rather than provide a counterpoint to Ahmadinejad’s ramblings, I would rather focus on the grim reality: Iran is led by an arrogant man who clearly has no grip on reality – and who cares even less about the veracity of his statements or the soundness of his policies.  Ahmadinejad is unquestionably dangerous.

His pursuit of nuclear technologies only makes him, and Iran, more worrisome.  Sure, Ahmadinejad says that Iran needs reliable nuclear power.  But he naively expects the world to ignore Iran’s tremendous reserves of oil.  Obviously, Ahmadinejad’s Iran possesses sufficient reserves of energy. 

On the other hand, his is a country which has threatened to erase Israel from the pages of time.  And as dangerous as we perceive Ahmadinejad to be, he is much less experienced, formidible or hard-line as the ayatollahs in Iran’s background.  They make Ahmadinejad’s bluster seem harmless by comparison to their stance on Israel and America.  Certainly, nuclear weapons would add a sinister overtone to his threats.  Any nuclear escalation could lead to the total collapse of the Middle East region.

Ahmadinejad, who every day reminds Americans of North Korea’s equally eccentric leader Kim Jong-Il, is exactly the reason why America needs to become energy independent.”