Inside voices

Great piece in Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria.

One man who is greatly enjoying being the subject of this outsize portraiture is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He has gone from being an obscure and not-so-powerful politician—Iran is a theocracy, remember, so the mullahs are ultimately in control—to a central player in the Middle East simply by goading the United States and watching Washington take the bait. By turning him into enemy No. 1, by reacting to every outlandish statement he makes, the Bush administration has given him far more attention than he deserves.

As Zakaria and others have pointed out, making international statements for the benefit of domestic approval is usually a recipe for disaster. President Bush and many of the leaders of antagonistic states exhibit a rhetorical similarity, a similarity that would be loudly denounced if it were ever brooked in the press.

- Murphy