The Devil on Broadway

"Iran's hard-liners are pushing their country into a dangerous and perhaps crippling isolation that could, if Tehran continues on this path, eventually make it another North Korea...And Ahmadinejad, on the cusp of his trip to New York this week to speak to the U.N. General Assembly, has veered even deeper into a David Duke-like rhetoric about the Holocaust and the role of Jews in history."

(Juan Cole, "Does Iran Want to be a Pariah?", Salon)

Juan Cole, traditionally far from hawkish, comes down hard on the Iranian regime today in Salon.  The University of Michigan professor, who actually speaks Farsi, has continually provided the sanest voice in the public debate over just how to deal with Iran's developing nuclear program (Cole has tirelessly corrected misuse of Ahmadinejad's oft-misquoted 'vow' to "wipe Israel off the map").  If he is this pessimistic about Iran's desire for rapprochement with the West, it does not bode well for Obama's oft-criticized (albeit on Fox News) intention to sit down with the enigmatic regime.

At the height of the "election" protests in July, Iranian scholar Reza Aslan suggested that the country was teetering between China and North Korea.  Although a strong dissident movement remains as active as it can, and the president-select himself appeared to moderate temporarily in the wake of the July fiasco (he clashed publicly with supreme leader Khamenei over the selection of a vice president, and even over the appointment of a woman to a cabinet level position), Cole clearly interprets Ahmadinejad's recent rhetoric as a move towards the crackpot alternative, as opposed to the merely despotic.  

A month ago there was still a rationalist explanation to all of this: the regime, wanting to play up its democratic legitimacy at upcoming nuclear talks, tried to artificially inflate it's 'political capital' by fudging an election it likely could have just won fairly.  I don't see a rationalist explanation for Ahmadinejad's Jerusalem Day speech.       

The devil comes to Broadway this week.  It would be great theatre, if only it were fiction.