Lost in the hype surrounding Ahmadinejad’s visit is the fundamental question: how much does he matter? Democracy Arsenal has the video of Lee Bollinger’s opening remarks and I found it interesting that among the Columbia University President’s criticisms of Ahmadinejad, were Ahmadinejad’s policies and, more specifically, his policies towards women. I’m not trying to defend the guy, but it was Ahmadinejad who was responsible for the law permitting women to attend soccer matches about a year ago and the religious establishment that compelled him to rescind it. So, while Bollinger’s speech sounded nice, we should be careful not to render Ahmadinejad a straw-man. He is absolutely not singularly responsible for the path that Iran has taken.

Then, the real question is: Who Rules Ahmadinejad’s Iran? This is a link to an article that I co-authored with some of my U.S. Institute of Peace colleagues earlier this year. The article summarizes the contents of a meeting of the Institute’s Iran Policy Forum, which brings together most of the top Iran analysts in D.C. and the world. Here’s a teaser:

“… Public opinion also has significant influence on the character of Iran’s decision-making. The results of recent elections furnish evidence of this influence: they have produced presidents as divergent in character and political platform as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mohammad Khatami. International pressure and world opinion, particularly public opinion in the Islamic world, affect Iran’s foreign policies as well. Iranian support to groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas stems in part from the support that those groups enjoy in the Muslim world. In turn, Iran’s leaders perceive that support for these groups contributes to the nation’s regional standing; recent popular opinion polls conducted in the Arab world indicated that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, and Ahmadinejad are currently the two most popular leaders in that region.

“That said, the power of republican institutions and popular opinion in the Iranian political order is severely checked by non-elected actors and organizations…”

So check out the article by heading to the link above.

No homosexuals in Iran… how about Transsexuals?

Even if there are no homosexuals in Iran, as Ahmadinejad claimed at Columbia, there certainly are transsexuals. Al-Arabiya, of all the news outlets in the world, did a pretty insane report that MEMRI translated and is posted on You Tube. Although MEMRI is not always so accurate, I watched this for an Arabic class and the translation is fine.