Listening to Ahmadinejad: Can this advance the cause of Truth?

As I listened to President Ahmadinejad, I kept thinking of the importance of his listening to us, even taking notes on the questions addressed to him—even the very tough questions. At the end of the eleven questions, he pretty much dealt with them one by one in his response. How different from the gathering at Columbia University last year where the university president excoriated President Ahmadinejad even before he had said anything.

I thought of the presidential campaign in which Obama is ridiculed as naïve for being willing to meet with our nation’s adversaries. And I recalled the opportunities missed time and again:  of Reagan’s calling Khadaffi a ‘looney tunes’ dictator in rejecting the Libyan dictator’s invitation to come ‘sit in his tent’ to discuss differences; of Bush’s labeling the leader of North Korea a ‘pigmy’ and of Bush’s refusal to respond to President Ahmadinejad’s long letter over two years ago calling for the two nations to meet and discuss their differences (I’d love to see two fundamentalist presidents have such a discussion!); I thought of Castro time and time again being held up to withering scorn and isolation. And I also recalled the opposite approach: of Nixon going to China to the astonishment of the world; of Reagan and Gorbachev meeting in Iceland and astounding their advisers by calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons; of Vietnam veterans going to Vietnam to establish post-war contact and begin projects of healing; and of FOR’s many peace and friendship delegations to the U.S.S.R.

I was intrigued by what President Ahmadinejad said about nuclear weapons, that they were un-Islamic and that Iran was not trying to get nuclear weapons but nuclear power to help it overcome its severe energy problem. And that, by the way, it was spending more on developing alternative forms of energy. If we really want peace in the Middle East, he said, why don’t we get our ally Israel to get rid of its hundreds of nuclear weapons? He didn’t mention the nukes of Russia, India, Pakistan, the U.S., however. Why not?

I’d like a document by U.S. and Iranian scholars to examine both countries’ nuclear policies.

And I’d like another document to explicate what President Ahmadinejad means by “Israel and the U.S. disappearing from the map.” Is this a military threat, as it is endlessly referred to by the U.S. press and political authorities? Or is it more a theological/philosophical argument that nations which stand against history and who oppress people will eventually collapse by their own actions (as Iranians have told me)?

I believe that Truth is Power. And I believe that nations lie. Maybe this remarkable meeting we were privileged to have can, among other things, help advance the cause of Truth and make peace possible.

Richard Deats is editor emeritus of Fellowship magazine, and a member of the international steering committee of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. He traveled to Iran in May 2006 as co-leader of FOR's second civilian diplomacy delegation to the country.