Washington must talk to Tehran

Last November the Iranian people were privileged to watch perhaps the year’s most bizarre presidential home video, in which the new President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, described how a divine glow of light had played around him as he delivered his first address to the United Nations. ‘I felt it,’ the President recalled. ‘All of a sudden the atmosphere changed there. And for 27 to 28 minutes, all the world leaders did not blink…. It’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking. They were astonished, as if a hand had held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.’

The real reason for the glazed looks of the assembled world leaders that day at the UN was almost certainly rather simpler. It was, as one official put it, that they simply couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Mr Ahmadinejad spoke in messianic terms of Iran’s struggle against Western ‘state terrorism’, its ‘logic of the dark ages’, and called on the Divinity to ‘hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that pure and perfect human being’.