1115.org

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has “invited President Bush to speak at an Iranian university if the American leader ever traveled to the Islamic Republic”.

There is, of course, no question of Bush ever visiting Iran.

Heck, he’s made only three visits to Iraq since Mission Accomplished day (which was more than four years ago), and Iraq is arguably the most important foreign country to the Bush presidency.

Iran, by contrast, is a country we are still barely willing to talk to at the ambassador level. Condi Rice has managed to scrape up the occasional meeting or “meeting” with their foreign minister. But there’s no way we are dignifying that ranking member of the Axis of Evil with a presidential visit.

Moreover, had there been even the slightest possibility of Bush visiting Iran by the end of his term, that invitation to address an Iranian university is probably enough to cause those plans to be immediately aborted.

Because if there’s one thing you can totally take to the bank, it is that Bush would receive an introduction that would make Lee Bollinger’s introduction of Ahmadinejad seem like an ungainly love-fest.

They would probably start by recycling great chunks of Bollinger’s prose. For example, I can see them applying “you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator” to Bush with great glee. Phrases like “fanatical mind-set” and “astonishingly undereducated” actually appear to have been written for Bush, and borrowed for use against Ahmadinejad. And Bush can always safely be told: “”Mr. President, I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions”, since he has never — not once — in his presidency ever actually answered a single question at a press conference.

And, of course, there would in addition be all kinds of references to torture and kidnapping (dressed up in Bush-speak as extraordinary rendition, as if that somehow makes it morally defensible) and secret prisons, to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, to violations of the Geneva conventions and unilateral war-mongering

And while Ahmadinejad was able to take all the crap they threw at him, and continue to smile and smile and be a villain, I’m not sure too many people would be willing to bet too much money that Bush would be able to sit there and take it, without exploding into a temper tantrum.

Prick Cheney would certainly never give Georgie permission to address an Iranian university. Or, in all probability, such obvious decisions are not even made by Prick Cheney himself. Some Monica Goodling type person in his office would probably send back a “No way!” under Cheney’s signature.