It is important to keep in mind that the Iranian people elected Ahmadinejad and that he is in many ways a typical Iranian man who is still somewhat popular in his country. His views on the United States, Israel and the West in general are likely the views of the Iranian "street," the population at large. There is no doubt that the US is viewed negatively by the vast majority of Iranians because of things we have done to Iran. The US and her allies overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister, in 1953 and installed the Shah. We supplied arms to Iraqis in the Iraq-Iran War and have labeled the country a member of the "axis of evil." A demagogue like Ahmadinejad will use this history to further his anti-Western agenda, but the US has to restore its moral legitimacyin order to combat leaders like the one heard today.

Here are some areas where US moral high ground is vulnerable. While talking about the importance of using science ethically, he mentioned how the US uses technology to tap the phones of its own citizens, a reference to provisions in the Patriot Act. How can America claim to be the exemplar of moral government when such basic liberties as privacy are being violated? He further stated that science is monopolized by the strongest powers, referring to how nuclear technology is limited to a select group of nations. While Ahmadinejad is more interested in obtaining a nuclear weapon than in the merits of free exchange of technology, the US does not aid its credibility when it still has enough atomic weapons to destroy the world and publicly considers building new nuclear weaponry. Iran does have executions, some of them public, but who is the US to bully Iran on this issue when it is the only industrialized country to maintian capital punishment? And what of torture at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and so many other sites of unfortunate violations in the recent past?  It is easy to see how any defect in America's democratic credentials can be twistedinto a justification for Ahmadinejad's far worse conduct.

Ahmadinejad's reluctance to accept the Holocaust is disturbing, but this event explicitly showed that his denial of the Holocaust is linked with Israel's human rights abuses in the region. He knows that the Holocaust is the primary justification for the creation of Israel but asks why, if the Holocaust happened in Europe, Palestinians are meant to pay for it. In this sense the Bush Administration would do much more to defang Ahmadinejad by seriously pursuing peace between Israel and Palestine, which has been on the backburner due to the War in Iraq, than it does through bellicose rhetoric and vacuous claims of moral superiority.

So he came, and he was what many expected him to be-a cunning, demagogic politician who simply wouldn't answer a question honestly. But America has politicians like this as well, who will mislead the American people into war and through our government into scandal after scandal after scandal. What was extraordinary about this visit was what Ahmadinejad exposed about us, America, a country that has lost so much of its moral credibility in the past few years. Where we were able to show our ethical high ground best, as both a university and as a country, was in granting Mr. Ahmadinejad his right to free speech. If we can be sure of one thing it is that those rights will disappear as he flies back to Tehran.