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No Place for That Photo-Op

[Washington Post] Walter Reich - Even though Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust happened, has threatened to wipe out Israel and attack the U.S., provides the munitions that kill U.S. troops in Iraq, is furiously trying to build nuclear weapons and is president of a country that Washington has declared the world's chief state sponsor of terrorism, some argued that he should be allowed to visit Ground Zero and see for himself the consequences of terrorism. Why not give Iran's president a chance to be educated and transformed? That misguided thinking is strikingly familiar to me. In 1998, the Clinton White House and State Department invited Arafat to Washington to lay a wreath in memory of the dead at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. White House officials hoped that photos of him looking mournfully at images of dead Jews would convince living Jews that he genuinely felt their pain, truly understood their anxieties about Israel's security and could be trusted to protect the Jewish state in a final peace deal. When, as the museum's director, I learned of the invitation, I immediately objected to it. I said that the visit had been set up as a photo-op, and that neither the museum nor the dead should ever be used to advance political or diplomatic ends. The writer is a professor of international affairs at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
2007-09-24 01:00:00
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