How a great initiative went awry
I write this informally as a longstanding member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Council's "selected members only" event this week featuring President Ahmadinejad has clearly generated a controversy that, at the very least, will last for a while. I wasn't invited to the event, although I would have loved to have been there in view of my familiarity and writings about Iran since the Shah's time and into the present. Here are some thoughts about the "event":
1. I think CFR president Richard N. Haass took a courageous step in inviting President Ahmadinejad. I speak with some bias, of course, because I am an admirer of Richard and believe that his presidency has infused the Council with fresh energy and enterprise. It is important for the Council to hear major figures of all political persuasions and ideologies. Ahmadinejad holds political and historical views that are offensive to many Americans -- and others -- and that's precisely why it was right to invite the Iranian president to address the Council. A guest's views, however unconventional, need not conform to the sensibility of sophisticated people such as CFR members. Dialogue needs to be sustained, not constrained. And the Council is traditionally very good about being inclusive.
2. I'm not privy to the discussions behind the arrangements for the event. But I do feel, as do many Council members, that CFR should have insisted on the event taking place at its headquarters. Ahmadinejad took total control of the event by setting the venue -- the hotel where he was staying in Manhattan. By doing so, I think he diminished the Council's status as the world's pre-eminent think tank and the informal home of the American Establishment.
3. The meeting should have been open to all Council members, not just a select few. Precisely because Council events serve as an open forum for its members, what usually comes out of meetings is a cross fertilization of ideas, intellectual inquiry, a cerebral ferment -- and, often enough, suggestions that offer solutions to some of the most vexing problems of our time in that zone where foreign-policy issues converge with issues of a more general social and economic nature. It's the transparency that Richard Haass and CFR chairman Peter Peterson have encouraged that has made the Council more influential and productive than ever before. The Ahmadinejad event simply wasn't in the spirit of the "new" Council.
I also submit that those Council invitees who boycotted the event would have benefitted from simply observing President Ahmadinejad at close quarters. Body language and facial expressions do matter in the theater of diplomacy. Very little of what the president said turned out to be surprising; his anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-US views have been amply articulated on many occasions. But in this interrelated, rapidly globalizing world of ours, engagement -- or at least acquaintance -- with the "enemy" will increasinly matter. The boycott of the event by some distinguished Council invitees gave Ahmadinejad new ammunition that he didn't deserve and that, no doubt, he will put to use to further his own agenda.