Romney's foreign folly

POLITICIANS OFTEN strike foolish poses when overcome by an ambition to run for president, but Governor Mitt Romney staked out a new frontier when he denied Iran's former reformist president Mohammed Khatami security assistance from the state this weekend, when Khatami is scheduled to speak at Harvard's Kennedy School.

It is bad enough that Romney did not distinguish between Khatami, the well-known partisan of a dialogue of civilizations, with Iran's current president, the belligerent Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some reactionaries in this country may want to obscure the stark differences between Khatami and Ahmadinejad, and Romney, who has been courting the far right of the Republican Party, may have fallen under the influence of those deliberate simplifiers.

But Romney hardly looks presidential when he castigates Harvard for its decision to invite Khatami to address a Kennedy School forum. Few things are more essential to a university than the exercise of free inquiry. Like other American colleges and universities, Harvard has a long history of hosting figures who have been controversial or who exercised power in abusive regimes. Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, and Jiang Zemin, former president of China: They all came to Harvard and had their say before students, faculty, and the general public.

Yet Romney saw fit to declare that the Kennedy School's invitation to Khatami is ``a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists." The kindest thing to say about this denunciation of Harvard's devotion to active and open dialogue is that it illustrates the crucial difference between political thinking and the real thing.

Romney's briefers may not have told him that Khatami was one of the first leaders of a Muslim country to express sympathy with Americans after Sept. 11, denouncing the attack by Sunni Arab fanatics of Al Qaeda as barbaric. While president of Iran, Khatami tried to open up possibilities for freedom of speech, and he sought improved relations with the West. He was severely constrained in what he was able to accomplish by a political system that vested true power not in the elected president but in the unelected cleric known as Supreme Leader, in Iran's repressive security services, and in a hard-line judiciary in thrall to the religious authorities.

Khatami deserves the criticism he has received from Iranians disillusioned at his failure to reform Iran's theocratic dictatorship. But though he was an ineffectual reformer, he is hardly a terrorist. Romney's muddle-headed characterizations of Khatami and Harvard suggest that he has been prepping at the Dick Cheney school of statecraft.