Goofy and mildly alarming, but I wouldn't put him in the dreaded H__ler class, or even up there with the truly batty Kim Jong-Il. This guy is far from a dictator. The clerics still run Iran. And it's not like he's wildly popular back home, anyway. He -- seriously! -- may get voted out of office in the near future.
Iran is another one of these places where our deeply held American desire to either: a) completely ignore the rest of the world (the preferred choice); b) view the rest of the world in strictly Manichean friend-or-foe binaries produces a potentially blundering mix of ignorance and assumed moral clarity, wherein our successful policies tend to bubble up by sheer accident.
No matter who wins the upcoming election, I really hope we get statesmen who are cynical and conniving and deft and cunning toward other nations, and not toward our own electorate. We could use a foreign policy that is less motivated by academic ideology and more motivated by real world power considerations.
Iran is another one of these places where our deeply held American desire to either: a) completely ignore the rest of the world (the preferred choice); b) view the rest of the world in strictly Manichean friend-or-foe binaries produces a potentially blundering mix of ignorance and assumed moral clarity, wherein our successful policies tend to bubble up by sheer accident.
No matter who wins the upcoming election, I really hope we get statesmen who are cynical and conniving and deft and cunning toward other nations, and not toward our own electorate. We could use a foreign policy that is less motivated by academic ideology and more motivated by real world power considerations.
