New York Braces for Ahmadinejad

A major drama is shaping up over the planned appearance at the United Nations next week of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with the Jewish community scheduling a protest rally, Mitt Romney calling on the world body to ban the tyrant, and the U.N. Security Council set to consider whether to increase sanctions against the mullahs for their uranium enrichment program.

In Vienna, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, is emerging as the top defender of Iran, arguing at the IAEA's annual assembly yesterday that just as no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Iran does not present a nuclear menace now. He has been raging against any punitive measures, signing secret pacts with Tehran, and directly confronting not only America, Britain, and Germany but also France, where the Quai D'Orsay is warning of war.

But here in New York, the mood at Turtle Bay is less predictable than in the past, in part because, in sharp contrast to a former U.N. chief, Kofi Annan, Secretary-General Ban has signaled he may side with the West this time. And a Jewish community leadership, animated in part by the success Mr. Ahmadinejad has had in finding allies within the political debate in America, has scheduled a rally on Monday in front of the United Nations.

"It's a message to the world leaders about their responsibility," a vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, said. "This is somebody who violated the United Nations charter and should not be given that platform."

Mr. Ahmadinejad is scheduled to speak at the U.N. General Assembly next week as the U.N. Security Council considers whether to increase sanctions against Iran for its uranium enrichment program. In calling for a ban on his visit, Mr. Romney said it was "simply unacceptable to bring a man to the world stage who has called for the elimination of another nation." The former governor of Massachusetts, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination who spoke outside St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan yesterday, was referring to past statements by Mr. Ahmadinejad that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Mr. Romney last year refused to assign a police escort to Mr. Ahmadinejad's predecessor, Mohammed Khatami, when he visited Harvard University for a speaking engagement. On the day Mr. Ahmadinejad is due to arrive, September 24, members of the U.S. Marine Corps will flood Midtown. A spokesman said their presence was not timed to coincide with his arrival. The Marines are filming an advertising campaign in Times Square to boost recruitment and will be performing silent drills, according to the Marines Web site.

In Vienna, Mr. ElBaradei told reporters yesterday that he was asking "everyone to hold their horses. We need to be cool and not hype the Iranian issue." His remark was made in response to a televised interview Sunday in which French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, made the preparations for war against Iran sound more urgent than any other Western leader had before him.

"We will not accept that the bomb is manufactured" by Iran, Mr. Kouchner said. "We must prepare for the worst. The worst, sir, is war."
Mr. Kouchner will be among those accompanying President Sarkozy to New York for the opening of the General Assembly debate, where many world leaders will be in attendance and where Mr. Ahmadinejad has challenged President Bush to a debate on world issues.

Foreign office political directors of the five permanent Security Council members and Germany are expected to gather in Washington on Friday to plan a new resolution that may include further sanctions and other punitive measures against Iran for its refusal to end uranium enrichment. Foreign ministers of the six countries will meet again at the United Nations next week.

Security Council diplomats told The New York Sun yesterday that they doubt a resolution can be agreed on before France completes its rotating Security Council presidency, at the end of the month. As they have done in the past, Iran's council allies, Russia and China, are expected to use Mr. ElBaradei's words to frustrate any significant punishment.

All this will be taking place against a background of recent press reports to the effect that in Washington war preparations have been accelerated, as Iran has made strides in its nuclear program. The London Sunday Telegraph reported over the weekend that Pentagon planners have picked 2,000 Iranian targets for bombing and that though Secretary of State Rice has been pushing for diplomatic solution, she now may join Vice President Cheney in backing military action.

"We are proud that today we can target enemies within a range of two thousand kilometers and that we can powerfully and courageously resist against any kind of enemy with the weapons that we have," the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guard corps, General Mohammad Hassan Kusehchi, was quoted yesterday by Tehran's Fars News Agency as saying. "Fortunately, we have such a good control over the region that no enemy can even think of invading Iran."

With this escalation as background, Mr. ElBaradei has continuously urged the West to soften its line on Iran. Earlier, he called for "dual suspension," in which Iran would suspend enrichment at the same time the Security Council suspends the existing sanctions against Iran. Last month, he struck a secret deal with Iran to allow reporting of its past transgressions, rather than accounting for current violations of Security Council resolutions.

American, French, British, and German diplomats in Vienna voiced their discomfort to the IAEA chief. Asked about it last week, Mr. Ban said: "What is important at this time is that, in addition to what IAEA has been negotiating and discussing with the Iranian government, the Iranian government should fully comply with the Security Council resolutions. That is the core."

Earlier, Mr. Ban denounced Iran's call to wipe Israel off the map, calling the threat against a member state of the United Nations "unacceptable." But when she was asked yesterday about a call by several prominent Americans to declare Iran's threat to obliterate a member state a violation of the U.N. charter and to suspend its General Assembly privileges, Mr. Ban's spokeswoman, Michele Montas, declined to comment.

New York City Police Department officials said yesterday that the city would deploy thousands of its officers to protect Mr. Ahmadinejad, along with the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan and other countries as they gather for the 62nd session of the General Assembly, which technically opens today. Streets will be blocked off to protect the dignitaries as they move through the city and also to accommodate dozens of protests.

The visits by the high-profile heads of state attending the U.N. meetings could set back city taxpayers millions of dollars that the federal government may — or may not — reimburse, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

"We'll do whatever we can, regardless of the cost, and then we'll try to get the federal government to pay the security costs, which they are obligated to do for U.N. visitors under an agreement in which they seldom do. But we're not going to spare any expense," he said.

The police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, called the General Assembly security task "a major operation for us, but it's something we've done every year for many years in the past."

The prospect of Mr. Ahmadinejad visiting the city recalled the famous reaction of Theodore Roosevelt to the visit of a German anti-Semite to the city back in the days when Roosevelt was police commissioner. In his autobiography, published in 1913, Roosevelt wrote about how he assigned to the anti-Semite an all-Jewish security detail.

"The proper thing to do was to make him ridiculous," Roosevelt wrote. "It was the most effective possible answer; and incidentally it was an object lesson to our people, whose greatest need is to learn that there must be no division by class hatred."