Thank you, Columbia

In 1990, I had the privilege of hearing a talk by Gorbachev's press spokesman (or whatever his title was) when I was at college. The Berlin wall had been down for just a few weeks, and there was struggle in Georgia and Lithuania over independence. Glasnost and Perestroika were just starting to become reality. It was a great learning experience for me, and this was not even the real world leader himself talking. At the end of his remarks, Gorbachev's spokesman expressed his genuine delight at what he called the American public's unbelievable capacity to forgive. How much more amazing would this encounter have been if the cold war had been ongoing! On another occasion in 2002, I got the chance to hear from the Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia, eager to westernize and willing to chide about Kosovo. He was assassinated a couple of years later.

It is hard to remember now with my 1990 encounter, but just two years before, this was the Evil Empire, and its spokesman would have been drowned by a sea of protest dwarfing that meted out to Ahmadinejad today. When I visited East Berlin in the summer of 1989, the end of the Cold War seemed impossible. A man had been shot just days before my visit trying to escape. A shame he didn't wait four more months.

I have no idea if or when rapprochement with Iran will ever come, but I think it is terrific that students at Columbia have had the opportunity to see what a world leader is like. Think of it as a zoo exhibit, if nothing else. Seriously. Congratulations to the faculty at Columbia for giving their students the chance to see a world leader up close. Up close, the media image goes away. The fangs recede. They get to see a liar and a clod with few PR skills. A man of very limited experience. A sleazy salesman who wants to put his finger on a nuclear trigger so he can feel like a big man. You know Ahmadinejad looked around New York City and realized, perhaps for the first time, how fourth-rate Tehran is.

The Columbia students also got to see a rather pathetic side of their own compatriots. The braying of politically correct protestors who obsess over what oozes out of Ahmadinejad's mouth.

But most of all, the Columbia students are going to get to learn over the coming days that the news coverage of the event and all the punditry won't match up at all with what they saw. Because it never does. What a great civics lesson. So thank you, Columbia.