Reblogged: Ziggymania More Ziggy-isms

There is a plethora of commentary available for extraction from this, sarcastic and otherwise, but for the time being, I am going to take the minimalist approach.

DW-WORLD: The Iranian President Ahmadinejad has ridiculed the European offer to provide a light-water reactor as an incentive to freeze uranium enrichment. Has diplomacy failed?

Zbigniew Brzezinski: One has to recognize that when one says President Ahmadinejad, one is using the title of president which means something entirely different in the West from what it means in the Iranian system. President Ahmadinejad is not the President of Iran in the sense that the President of the US is Mr. Bush, and the President of France is Mr. Chirac.

The position of the president in Iran is roughly a third-level position. His executive powers are quite limited.

What the West has done, and what the US in part has done, is to elevate him into an interlocutor, who then uses the debate with the West to enhance his domestic political power. So I don’t consider his responses to be authoritative.

In other words, if the leader of an antagonist country is making your analysis untenable, discount the fool.

I would add, however, that when one talks about the President of the United States and the President of France, there is a sense of difference in that comparison as well.