Here's the story:

Iran's President Sparks Fears of New Isolation
Nuclear Talks at Risk, Analysts Say

By Karl Vick

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, November 5, 2005; A14

. . . "In Iran as everywhere else in the world, radicalism seeks isolation in diplomacy," said Saeed Laylaz, an economist and commentator in Tehran. Ahmadinejad "seems to be trying to push the country this way," Laylaz said. "He twice mentioned Israel should be wiped off the map -- twice -- and he knows that 20 days later we have to face the IAEA. It's not good for the country". . .

Some analysts suggested that Ahmadinejad, who came to the presidency with no foreign policy experience, might simply be in over his head. Elected on a populist economic platform, the former Tehran mayor cast himself as an ordinary Iranian intent on reviving the ideals of the revolution.

"His image of the world is still very, very local," said Hadi Semati, a Tehran University political scientist who is a resident at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Some critics cite evidence from across Iran that the new government is struggling to master the levers of power.

Four major ministries, including the oil ministry, remain without new leaders after the conservative parliament rejected Ahmadinejad's choices. Tehran's stock exchange has lost a third of its value since his election, which profoundly unsettled business circles. And Ahmadinejad's interior minister irritated consumers last month by hinting that Iran might ban imports of goods from Britain and South Korea in retaliation for their IAEA votes.

"All over the country, people believe he does not have the ability to handle the problems," Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a professor of international law at Tehran's Supreme National Defense University, said of Ahmadinejad . . .

But there are indications that the president's confrontational stance is deliberate. In a field of half a dozen presidential candidates, only Ahmadinejad rejected rapprochement with the West. And when he arrived at the United Nations in September, he offered Secretary General Kofi Annan not the new ideas he had promised to help stave off confrontation over the nuclear issue, but a legalistic defense of Iran's right to nuclear technology.

Annan was stunned, according to notes taken by a member of Annan's staff and two other people who attended the private meeting. "It's time to act like a statesman," he told Ahmadinejad.

After his U.N. speech, Ahmadinejad was asked, through a series of contacts between his staff members and European officials, not to repeat the argument in a speech several days later. Instead, he included three references to Iran's intentions to enrich uranium.

"We gave him 24 hours to rewrite that speech, and instead of choosing softer language that could have saved the diplomatic process, he just toughened it up," a senior European official said . . .

Seems clear to me. We're being victimized by a hardliner for domestic political purposes.

And he's playing us like a guitar. . .