I’m a little confused by the framing of the decision to extend an invitation for Mahmoud Ahmadenijad to speak at Columbia University as “free speech.” Everyone, including Ahmadenijad, has a right to speak his mind in this country, but nobody has a right to a specific platform at a major university. I, after all, haven’t been granted such an invitation and there’s no particular reason he should have gotten one either. For all the reasons Ross cites a lot of the right’s reaction to this has been overheated, but it’s still fundamentally odd to decide that a maniac should participate in a debate with a university president as part of a bizarre publicity stunt whose main purpose is to exaggerate the importance of both men.

Conversely, though, things like Duncan Hunter’s new plan to cut off funding to Columbia University is a real free speech issue. The university really has the right to stage an asinine publicity stunt if it wants to without the federal government stepping in.

Part of the tragedy here is that the American public really ought to know more about the Iranian government’s perspective on the issues of the day. The US and Iran have outstanding conflicts over nuclear issues, Iraq, and Afghanistan but also some potential for common interests on some of these topics. And most of the Iranian officials — Ali Larijani from the National Security Council, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from the Assembly of Experts, foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki — aren’t prone to rants about the non-existence of the Holocaust and all the rest. They’re not nice men as such, but they really are people such that it’s worth hearing what they have to say about the various issues in play. Unfortunately, both Ahmadenijad and America’s Iran hawks have an interest in pretending that Ahmadenijad’s a key actor and his goofier ideas are the center of the dispute. Why Bollinger wants to re-enforce this I couldn’t say. For attention, I guess.

UPDATE: See what Steve Clemons said about this.

UPDATE II: By contrast, the idea of forbidding Ahmadenijad from going to Ground Zero was crazy and closer to a real free speech issue. Moreover, it seems to me that the desire to visit the site was driven by a desire to underline the idea that the US and Iran face a common enemy in Iran, and the move to block him driven by a desire to obscure that point.

UPDATE III: One last point. I should be clear that it’s not just that “I, after all, haven’t been granted such an invitation and there’s no particular reason he should have gotten one either,” but that there are tons and tons of other heads of state and heads of government in New York for UN-related things at the moment and they’re obviously not all speaking at Columbia so it’s not as if Ahmadenijad is just getting some kind of automatic “foreign leader’s in town, let’s have a chat” treatment. What’s more, the vast majority of the heads of government hanging around the city have much more practical influence in their regimes than does Ahmadenijad. Sarkozy really runs France, etc.

McMegan says “Despite what Matt says, I fail to see how Bush made any difference, given that the Senate had rejected the treaty 99-0 with one abstainer.”

This is silly (about as silly as the view, sometimes expressed in comments, that I should avoid criticizing Megan when she writes things that are wrong on the theory that conservative views would somehow vanish if I ignored them) — Clinton signed the treaty, knowing he couldn’t get it ratified, and Bush un-signed it, knowing that there was no threat of ratification. Neither administration did what they did for no reason. Rather, they did it because of the impact on the political momentum, precisely the factor UN officials have cited to me as the relevant mechanism.

Meanwhile, let me also just say that I find there to be something incredibly wearing about this worldly-wise pose where one combines fatalism with nitpicking attacks on straw environmentalists instead of just forthrightly taking the view that the United States government ought to be indifferent to the problem of climate change. Maybe we’ll do the right thing, and maybe we won’t — the future isn’t written yet. One factor determining whether or not we do the right thing is whether or not right-of-center elites — yes, including political bloggers at the Atlantic — put emphasis on the idea that it’s important for us to do the right thing.

Unrelated to climate change, Israeli and Palestinians just completed a meeting, chaired by the foreign minister of Norway, aimed at re-starting the foreign aid process to the Palestinian Authority in a post-Hamas era. At the post-game press conference, there’s a remarkably nineties-esque spirit of cooperation. The Palestinian prime minister says the meeting was “quite successful,” and Tzipi Livni used her opening statement to say she “would like to make it clear on the opening that the creation of a Palestinian state is in the Israeli interest” and that while the specific subject at hand had been improving day-to-day life among the Palestinians, but that Israel wants “also to help in building the foundation for the future Palestinian state.”

Naturally, I agree. It’s actually fairly remarkable, given the depth, duration, and intensity of the conflict, that there’s very little in the way of objective conflict of interests between the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Saudi Arabia’s presentation was pretty hilarious. Their delegate, whose name I didn’t catch, starts off by saying all the usual stuff about the need for urgent action and the need to be guided by a principle of division of responsibility, wherein we understand that the poorer countries have done very little to contribute to this problem and shouldn’t be expected to bear the burden of fixing it. Saudi Arabia “looks forward to beginning negotiations” on these topics.

But then comes the pivot!

We need to also abide by “the principle of non-bias against specific goods in addressing climate change” and Saudi Arabia must object to the “selective nature of some policies and measures.” Specifically, “market interventions are being made with a view to impacting the relative costs of energy sources” which is outrageous. He actually managed to keep talking in this vein without saying the word “oil.” I’m told that at the same time Evo Morales was saying that “capitalism is the greatest enemy of humanity.”

All I really know about Nicholas Sarkozy is that American conservatives seem to really enjoy talking him up. Well, now I also know what I’m watching him say about climate change — stuff about points of no return, and the need for urgent action. Stuff about how we should reject the false choice between stewardship of the planet and economic growth; how in a policy atmosphere designed to reduce emissions we’ll create new jobs and new opportunities in new sectors of the economy. It’s good stuff, and being said with a great deal of passion and charisma.

So I hope the right talks this up, too. He even likes civilian nuclear power (I, personally, am sort of nuclear agnostic but certainly open to the idea that a proper price on carbon emissions might lead to more nuclear plants), so insofar as conservatives still want to hate environmentalists they can just get on board for Sarkozyism.

UPDATE: It’s been suggested in comments that “You know, if you wanted to, you could actually do some reading on this issue and come to a conclusion on whether or not nuclear power is a worthwhile investment. But I know that’s not the Yglesias way.” Sure, sure, I never read. Meanwhile, in the main influence on my nuclear thinking is this MIT study on the future of nuclear power.

At the plenary sessions, UN delegates sit around broad semi-circular desks behind the iconic name plates to identify the country they represent. The countries are seated in alphabetical order, so, as an Yglesias, I naturally sympathize with poor Zambia and Zimbabwe in the back of the bus so I cast my eye in their direction only to discover that Palestine, not being a real country, needs to go even after lowly Zimbabwe.

UPDATE: Photo:

Klein and Beutler express some skepticism about the significance of the High-Level Meeting happening today, and they make some good points. What’s happening is basically a form of kabuki. But I talked to a UN official yesterday who was able to explain the significance of the kabuki, and it’s a pretty important thing.

The basic shape of the issue goes back to Kyoto and the late 1990s. Everyone knew that that agreement wasn’t nearly tough enough to take care of the problem. But the thinking was that if you could get everyone to commit to the principle “reduce carbon emissions to halt global warming” that when the initial measures agreed to proved inadequate, governments would be compelled to step things up. Then came George W. Bush and his decision to “un-sign” Kyoto. Not only did that prevent the USA from moving forward, but it essentially got all the other governments of the world off the hook. With Bush so intransigent of course nothing was going to work.

Meanwhile, there’s a need for a successor treaty to Kyoto to govern the world after 2012. The thinking is that it takes two years to negotiate a treaty, and then two years to get it ratified. Thus, we need to start next year at a scheduled meeting in Bali, Indonesia. But if the world’s governments sit down in Bali next year cold after years of inactivity, then nothing’s going to happen. So there’s a kind of kabuki meeting happening this year to get things rolling. Since nothing’s going to happen, Bush is willing to participate — Condi Rice will be at the formal meeting, and Bush himself at an informal one with other heads of government this evening — but that itself signifies that the process is getting rolling again. The idea, then, is that the next administration will be able to hit the ground running, stepping into a process that’s already under way.

I’m at UN Headquarters in New York for the High-Level Event on Climate Change (reporting!). So far, nothing’s actually happened. This sign, however, is in the press room:

Since I guess US law isn’t enforced inside the building, Bloomberg can’t stop people from smoking.

Howard’s Alan McPherson says we should locate the precedents for Iraq in past American imperial ventures in Latin America:

Unfortunately, that ancient lesson has evidently been completely forgotten — even though it is most salient. What is Iraq now was Latin America then, a time and place where the force of the United States as an invading power was considered at least as powerful as it is today.

Whether in Haiti or elsewhere, Americans back then believed that they were top dog — and, after invading, could fix up a place like that rather quickly. Little did they know then… Little do we know now…

Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop made a related argument.