20 minutes

It was all too appropriate that the first episode of Ken Burns' The War was aired roughly forty minutes after 60 Minutes's interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ended. Burns titled his first episode "A Necessary War"; the interview pointed another way.

War with Iran is unimaginable at the moment. Taking on a bigger country, with our military resources stretched as thin as they are, seems like a very large second step toward our nation spending itself into irrelevance, largely in the name of securing our wealth and dominance. That said, as I watched Ahmadinejad last night, I thought of my dad's remarks from a couple of years ago: "They finally found a world leader who's dumber than Bush."

What I saw, between his weird smiles and circumlocution/ equivocation, was a world leader awkwardly trying to insert himself between the American Left and American Right, playing to Bush-haters inside and outside the U.S. Instead, Ahmadinejad proved that he hasn't got a clue what we're all about. (Bin Laden does this too: sometimes, among his 14th-century revenge fantasies, he tries to say something that parrots left-wing American criticism of Bush, but comes off sounding like a bloodthirsty fringe-nutball anyway.) I was still somewhat surprised at the hostility of the interviewer's very first question about the Ground Zero request ("What were you thinking?"), and found it unfortunate that the interviewer did not ask him directly whether he really does want Israel wiped off the map. If Ahmadinejad wanted to win any sympathy from liberal Americans, he blew his chance last night. Instead, he came off as a clown. Fortunately, most of Iran thinks he's one too. (Sound familiar?)

No, I'm not part of the "neoconservative push for war". I'm just remembering what I'm for, and what I'm against. [As for Burns, I'll be watching as much as I can this week.]