OK, we just manage to get comfortable with getting our tongues around the name Osama bin Laden, and suddenly to be able to talk intelligently about world affairs, we have to learn to say “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” (or various other spellings, like “Amadinejhad”). The always opinionated, sometimes dangerously scarey Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, just finished his hurried, but highly unappreciated visit to the United States, culminating with a protested appearance at Columbia University.

The university committee that invited him to speak felt that everyone has a right to be heard and debated, no matter how far off the mark his or her view of the world seems to be– certainly a noble aim for a university, but they didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet when Columbia President Lee Bollinger introduced the guest speaker by calling him every name in the book, including “astonishingly uneducated” and a “petty, cruel dictator”.

Ahmadinejad played the politician during his time at the Columbia podium, and was difficult to pin down on his more controversial statements from the past, such as his denial of the Jewish Holocaust and stated intentions of wiping Israel off the world map, despite questions on those topics from the students and audience gathered at Columbia.

Certainly he is a dangerous person, particularly sitting at the helm of one of the more powerful Arab nations, and holding shutoff valves to a lot of oil wealth. The United States has long claimed that his government is supplying terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan with weapons and funding, a claim that he side-stepped with other controversial issues. Ahmadinejad did state at Columbia University that Iran’s nuclear interests are only peaceful, despite American insistence that he has other intentions, but even under translation you get the feeling that you would not buy a used car from this man.

Probably the way that Ahmadinejad is most dangerous is that he provides an annoying voice as a target for George W. Bush, who appears to be itching for an excuse to invade Iran in the time he has left in office. Certainly Ahmadinejad can be called an idiot, but the American people don’t have the ability to compare his foolishness against the wisdom of their president, Bush being one of the most dangerously ridiculous presidents we have seen in recent history. With the presidential elections coming in 2008, Bush has nearly finished his maximum two terms, and he seems aware (in his view of things) that no president succeeding him will have the courage to invade Iran and expose their secret nuclear weapons, as he exposed the elusive “weapons of mass destruction” of Saddam Hussein. The truth of the matter is that no succeeding president is likely to be foolish enough to invade Iran on the heels of their troubles in Iraq.

Left to his own devices, Ahmadinejad is likely to eventually fall to the normal upheavals and fluctuations in his own country, not to mention the Arab world, and disappear from world attention, much like Mohmar Kadafi (Moammar Gadhafi in another spelling) did in Lybia. It’s believed that Ahmadinejad’s personal spin doctors will attempt to couch his US visit as a brave man venturing into the lands of the infidels and putting them soundly in their place, but most people with access to news are more likely to see him as rather foolish, unfortunately still dangerously so.

One has to wonder how the world got to this place, where the potential for conflict in the next year rests in the hands of these two exceptional men, and somewhere in the world two villages are looking for their idiots.