Kid Nation

(updated below)

Tonight I saw an ad for CBS's new reality show Kid Nation--"40 children, 40 days, no adults—eager to prove they can build a better world for tomorrow. . ."--and it occurred to me that we've pretty much been living that show for the last seven years.

Our government, and particularly our foreign policy, have been run by a bunch of children. Every issue, no matter how complex, has been reduced to a simple Good vs. Evil narrative. Naive utopian fantasies, instead of sober analysis and planning, have guided our actions. Domestic politics has come to be dominated by playground style name-calling. Perceived enemies at home and abroad have been reduced to cartoonish caricatures. And much of our discourse has consisted of a mindless pack-style swarming behavior in which everyone gangs up on whoever or whatever happens to have rubbed the cool kids the wrong way that particular day.

The outrage du jour, of course, is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York. As I noted in my previous post, right wing bloggers and pundits immediately flipped out about Ahmadinejad's proposed visit to Ground Zero. The Republican presidential candidates immediately followed suit. Giuliani called it "outrageous." Mitt Romney called it "shockingly audacious" and advised that we arrest and indict Ahmadinejad. And John McCain all but threatened to tackle him personally if he attempted to go near Ground Zero.

In the simplistic narrative that dominates Republican discourse, it doesn't matter that Ahmadinejad and Iran had nothing to do with 9/11 or that Iran in fact publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks shortly after they occurred. All that matters is that Ahmadinejad is an Evil Islamofascist and that the attacks were carried out by Evil Islamofascists. Ipso facto, it would be the ultimate insult to allow him anywhere near Ground Zero.

As Josh Marshall put it:

Is this man any worse than the various Soviet dignitaries who we feted and hosted around our country? Or is it simply that we've grown increasingly infantile as a country since the end of the Cold War, more and more obsessed and histrionic about minor powers like Iran and Iraq?

A president with some dignity and sense of the greatness of his country would say, good he should go there. Maybe he'll learn something about us and our loss.

If we as a country were a person, I'd say grow up. Act like a man. Have some self-respect.

Agreed. Moreover, our hysterical, utterly juvenile overreaction plays right into Ahmadinejad's hand politically. First, it elevates his importance far beyond anything he deserves. Second, it actually makes him more of a sympathetic figure to Iranians who wouldn't otherwise be inclined to side with him. To Iranians, it must seem like Americans either don't know or don't care about the difference between Persian Iranians and Sunni Arab terrorists like Osama bin Laden. Iran had nothing to do with 9/11, and I doubt that most Iranians appreciate their head of state being treated as if he and his country were somehow responsible for those events, particularly when all he planned to do was lay a wreath at the site. I intensely dislike George W. Bush, but if he were being insulted and threatened in another country for something that neither he nor America had anything to do with (and about which he was trying to make a public gesture of support), that would make me mad.

And as I wrote yesterday, having an important Muslim leader publicly pay respect to those who died on 9/11 would be a major public relations victory for us. Remember, the primary goal in the war on terror is to reduce the appeal of al Qaeda's ideology among the world's Muslim population.

The opposition to Ahmadinejad's trip to Columbia is even more infantile. The ever serious Michael Ledeen writes: "As for Columbia University, one can only propose the Chamberlain Award for Exceptional Appeasement." And Scott Johnson of Powerline excoriates Columbia President Lee Bollinger:

Columbia and President Bollinger are a disgrace. They welcome to their campus a man who is a ringleader in the seizure of American hostages, a terrorist, the president of a terrorist regime, and the representative of a regime responsible at present for the deaths of American soldiers on the field of battle. Columbia’s prattle about free speech may be a tale told by an idiot, but it signifies something. And President Bollinger is a fool who is not excused from the dishonor he brings to his institution and his fellow citizens by the fact that he doesn’t know what he is doing.

To hear Ledeen and Johnson tell it, you'd think Columbia was inviting Ahmadinejad over to mingle with the faculty and receive an honorary degreee. But of course that's not the case. Most of the panel will be devoted to a Q&A session in which Ahmadinejad will be pressed on the following subjects:

· the Iranian President’s denial of the Holocaust;
· his public call for the destruction of the state of Israel;
· his reported support for international terrorism that targets innocent civilians and American troops;
· Iran’s pursuit of nuclear ambitions in opposition to international sanction;
· his government’s widely documented suppression of civil society and particularly of women’s rights; and
· his government’s imprisoning of journalists and scholars, including one of Columbia’s own alumni, Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh.

Not exactly softball questions. As President Bollinger eloquently explains:

It should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices. To hold otherwise would make vigorous debate impossible.

That such a forum could not take place on a university campus in Iran today sharpens the point of what we do here. To commit oneself to a life—and a civil society—prepared to examine critically all ideas arises from a deep faith in the myriad benefits of a long-term process of meeting bad beliefs with better beliefs and hateful words with wiser words. That faith in freedom has always been and remains today our nation’s most potent weapon against repressive regimes everywhere in the world. This is America at its best.

I don't see how any adult can argue with that.

It's also worth noting that Ahmadinejad's beliefs and general mental state are key to the debate over whether we should launch a military strike against Iran. Those in favor of such an attack argue that Iran is run by irrational fanatics who are undeterrable by traditional means. Therefore, the argument goes, they must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons at all costs. Those who make this argument rely, almost exclusively, on troubling quotes from Ahmadinejad, often ones that are translated from obscure speeches delivered and transcribed in Farsi. Yet here we have a chance to explore Ahmadinejad's beliefs in a forum where Americans choose the questions and unclear statements can be clarified in real time. Ahmadinejad may not be fully candid in his responses, of course, but we would almost certainly come away from the forum with a better sense of who this man is. And that's invaluable.

What do we possibly have to lose by learning more about our perceived enemies? What exactly are the Michael Ledeens and Scott Johnsons of the world afraid of, that people might realize that the world is a little more complex than the cartoonish reality they've been describing?

I, for one, am tired of living in Kid Nation. Let's let the adults take a turn.

For some more adult perspectives I recommend James Joyner, Barbara O'Brien, Steve Benen, Steven Taylor, David Weigel, and, last but not least, BooMan.

UPDATE: In a post at the Weekly Standard entitled "Boycott Ahmadinejad," Bill Kristol writes:

A Columbia student asked how he could effectively protest his university's invitation to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak Monday. My first response was to suggest petitions, e-mails to President Bollinger and the university trustees, letters to the student paper, peaceful protest, and the like. All these are fine. But then I had a second thought. There might be one form of protest that would be effective both in showing appropriate disgust for the Iranian regime, and in shaming the Columbia administration: A total student boycott of Ahmadinejad's speech. Let the Iranian president (and the Columbia president) look out on, and speak to, a sea of empty seats on Monday.

The rationale for a student boycott is simple: The Iranian government is directly involved in killing and wounding American soldiers in Iraq. As a gesture of elementary solidarity with those serving our nation in the military--young men and women, many of them their exact contemporaries--Columbia students should refuse to dignify Ahmadinejad's talk by attending it. Needless to say, Columbia faculty and administrators shouldn't attend either. Some of them will. But this is a chance for the 9/11 generation to show a decency and a sense of honor that some of their elders lack. After all, this is not primarily about Ahmadinejad. Dealing with his regime is mostly a task for our government. This is about us. Columbia students have a chance to shame their elders, redeem the good name of their institution, and make many Americans proud. I urge them to take it.

That's some extraordinarily narrow-minded and un-American advice. I've got a far better piece of advice for Columbia students who don't like Ahmadinejad: go to the panel and confront him with hard-hitting questions. The opportunity to confront someone like Ahmadinejad in an open forum is rare indeed. We don't even get that kind of access to our leaders. When was the last time President Bush opened himself up to questions from a hostile audience?

Moreover, it's highly unlikely that most Columbia students know anything about Ahmadenijad other than what people like Bill Kristol choose tell them. If they attend the talk, they can, at the very least, come away hating a real person instead of a cartoonish caricature of one. It's as if Kristol believes that Ahmadinejad is some sort of pied piper who will lead all the students astray if they go anywhere near him. So they must be kept away.

It's all very silly. Columbia students are adults and they are in school to learn. Why pass up a rare opportunity to gain valuable insight into the mind of an indisputably important--albeit unsavory--world figure. The American thing to do is to confront objectionable ideas and the people who espouse them, not to put your fingers in your ears and ignore them. That's particularly true at an institution devoted to learning.