Can I be your poodle too, please?

Gordon Brown wants to emulate his predecessor Tony Blair, and be Bush’s poodle, if this report in the Telegraph is accurate:

Gordon Brown has agreed to support US air strikes against Iran if the Islamic republic orchestrates large-scale attacks by militants against British or American forces in Iraq, according to senior Pentagon officials. Washington sources say the Prime Minister has been informed of US plans to launch limited air and special forces raids against Revolutionary Guard bases.

After talks with President George W Bush in July, Mr Brown left US officials with the belief that Britain was “on board” for a military response — but only if Iran was proved to be behind a big militant attack or another stunt similar to the kidnapping in March of British sailors.

And what’s Brown going to accept as “proof”? The say-so of Dumbya?

(via Lenin’s Tomb)

Akbar Ganji’s open letter

Akbar Ganji is an Iranian journalist and dissident. On the occasion of President Ahmadinejad’s recent trip to the USA, Ganji wrote an open letter to Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations.

I think the letter deserves the widest possible audience, so here is the text in full (via Crooked Timber):

More on Ahmadinejad at Columbia

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, David Bernstein says Ahmadinejad shouldn’t have been allowed into the USA because he’s America’s enemy:

Unlike when I objected last time Ahmadinejad was to visit Columbia, my reason this time is that Ahmadinejad is the head of state of an enemy state, whose armed forces are killing American soldiers with equipment they provide to Iraqi insurgents. That makes Ahmadinejad an enemy of the United States, something that can’t be overcome with some questions.

I often hear the claim that Iran is arming Iraqi insurgents. But is there any evidence for it, from sources independent of the US government?

I’d genuinely like to know the answer to this. When I Google on “Iran helping Iraqi insurgents” I get lots of links saying things like “Iran Is Helping Insurgents in Iraq, U.S. Officials Say”, but nothing from independent sources.

Ahmadinejad at Columbia University

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is speaking at Columbia University today. Norm Geras questions whether he should have been allowed to:

Columbia President, Lee Bollinger, appeals to a number of different principles in getting behind the invitation, which was issued by the university’s School of International and Public Affairs.

One of these principles is ‘the development of freedom of speech’. On that score Bollinger says:

It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas.

He’s clearly right about this: listening doesn’t imply endorsement. On the other hand, there’s nothing in the principle of freedom of speech that requires you to help to promote or publicize views that you find deeply objectionable. Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denier and Holocaust-denial is one of the most poisonous forms of anti-Semitism, apart from being a brazen historical lie. Must Columbia, in the interests of ‘the development of free speech’, host avowed racists of every stripe, other genocide-deniers, men who think that women are, by their nature, born to be subservient, and people who think that homosexuality is a sin and should be punishable? Of course not. Would they host such people? I don’t know.

Geras is right that freedom of speech does not require one to facilitate speech you dislike. As to whether Columbia would host “such people”, they almost certainly have done in the past — such views were commonplace in the West in the mid 20th century.

(BTW I’ve no evidence that Ahmadinejad is a racist. If people are calling him a racist because he doesn’t like Jews, i.e. saying Jews are a race, then shouldn’t those people equally be condemning Israel as racist for being a Jewish state? Somehow I think they do not.)

As to whether Columbia should have invited him, the invitation came from Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Since Ahmadinejad is a head of stat, he forms part of the School’s subject matter; it is thus as appropriate for the School to invite him as it is for the microbiology department to bring microbes on campus and study them.

Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust-denier. Frankly I don’t think that’s a particularly big deal. All he has achieved by this is making himself (and by extension, Iran) look stupid, and playing into the hands of those in the USA who want to attack Iran. It’s not as if Iran was responsible for the Holocaust; if it had been then for that country to deny it would be something much more serious. But Turkey still denies that what they did to the Armenians amounted to genocide; and Belgium has only recently come to terms with Leopold II’s genocide in the Congo. Somehow I doubt there would be as much fuss if a Belgian or Turkish leader addressed a US university.