The British satirist Peter De Vries once remarked that certain people often appear profound on the surface while remaining superficial deep down. I can't imagine his evidence for making such an observation was any more arresting than this exercise in unmitigated nonsense and moral equivalence.

"We can agree about George Bush and his neocon ideologues. They are intent upon destroying both your part of the world and—unwittingly perhaps—mine."

I should very much like to know on what other specific points, apart from the broadstroke apocalyptic, Mr. Byrd and President Ahmadinejad find themselves in agreement. Could we start with a working Persian definition of "neocon" and progress from there?

Also, how does one tamper with the "energies of the people"? It's as if Shirley MacLaine and Vladimir Lenin teamed up to write a Hallmark card.

If this is Western civilization's strongest defense of itself, the mullahs may as well redouble the centrifuge pace at Natanz...

Seems to me that Professor Byrd chose to write a thoughtful, personal, moving response to Ahmadinejad. He's not attempting here to offer a "defense" of Western civilization--if anything, he's doing the opposite. And, hey, if you want a working Persian definition of "neocon," feel free to offer one yourself.

Also don't think the idea of tampering with the "energies of the people" is that difficult to parse. Maybe it would have been clearer to say "wasted the energies of the people" or "lied in order to divert and misuse the energies of the people" or something along those lines, but still the notion/reference isn't hard to grasp in this day and age.

Finally, I won't call Mr. Weiss's comment "unmitigated nonsense" and I won't try to label it a cross between the styles of, perhaps, Rush Limbaugh and good old D'Souza , but I will say that I disagree with its content and question the need for its insult-driven tone.

Anon, I'm with you. Since when is this feature supposed to be an exercise in self-defense?  And speaking of assumptions, since when does one experimental poet speak for all "Western Civilization?"  That concept is, if anything, even less nuanced than the generalizations in Ahmadinejad's letter.

Also, keep in mind that not everyone responds to such a letter in the form of a foreign policy term paper.  Don Byrd chose a literary approach, and I think his letter did exactly what literature is supposed to do: It put words to a highly personal experience.  

He writes, "There is a problem in trying to respond to you, and I think it goes to the heart of the muddled world. Everything I want to say sends me on rhetorical tangents. To get things straight enough to have a correspondence we would have to straighten out everything—every big thing humans ever thought." I can't think of a better way to express the difficulty of writing to someone across such an enormous national, ideological and cultural distance.

I suppose it wasn't terribly nuanced of me to object to this letter's moral equation of the current U.S. president with a man who:

a) denies the Nazi Holocaust and sponsors conferences in a capital city devoted to empirically debunking the atrocity;

b) weekly renews his and his confessional regime's long-term strategy to destroy a sovereign democratic state in the Middle East;

c) recycles the most notorious blood libels about the Jews and not-so-subtly implies (in his original letter) that they are at the levers of a global financial-political conspiracy; 

d) is the public face of a reactionary Islamic state working to develop a nuclear arsenal -- an act that is in direct contravention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to which that state is a signatory -- for the purpose of retaining its power indefinitely and furthering the long-term goal of destroying Israel.

What are these points compared to the tedious spadework of straightening everything out before we can engage in cross-cultural dialogue and find the Zen-like resolution to our mutual antagonisms?

Not sure what the Anonymous commentor means by "this day in age" making Byrd's nebulous gobbledygook more transparent: Would I have been more on target twenty or thirty years ago?  But I confess it was incredibly stupid of me to assume that a poet and professor of literature might take stronger objection to a propagandist for a government that silences all internal dissent and works toward the abolition of art and culture (including Persian art and culture) in favor of a single book drafted in the 7th century. 

Finally, judging by D'Souza's latest thesis, which exculpates Islamism for its love of pious tradition, he's more on Ahmadinejad's side, too.

Mr. Weiss's response to Don Byrd is replete with all the trappings of neo-conservative rhetoric: a) ridicule instead of reason; b) obscure the issues as much as possible; c) marshal facts irrelevant to the case; d) when all else fails - scare.

Everything Mr. Weiss says of Mr. Ahmadinejad is true; however, it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter why Mr Ahmadinejad wrote what he did; consequently, it doesn't matter what Mr. Ahmadinejad believes, nor does it matter what he wants from some Shi'ite utopia of the future.

The question Mr. Ahmadinejad raises (for whatever reason), and to which Profesor Byrd responds (for reasons he makes clear), is: Must we destroy the world in order to come to our senses?

Mr. Weiss seems to have no answer to that question, because, as far as I can tell, he's never thought of it. He speaks of the Holocaust and yet apparently has no idea what it means, other than some people who were Jewish were unnecessarily killed by some people who were not, and therefore we must allow any violence in retaliation (against whom? - all the Germans involved are dead, as far as I know).

In describing the Holocaust, an uncle told me that the grave mistake the victims had made, in not putting up a fight against the Nazis, was begging the question of the Almighty: Shall we be saved or not? and the Almighty answered another question: And what if you are not saved? Shall you believe or not?

Apparently Mr. Weiss does not believe. Professor Byrd, though not Jewish, perhaps of no religion, in any traditional sense, yet clearly does.

We need fewer victims like Mr. weiss (and Mr. Bush, and perhaps Mr. Ahmadinejad, despite his protest otherwise). We need more believers like my uncle and Professor Byrd. We need to stop being afraid and acting accordingly; we need to stop begging the question of the Almighty. His response could destroy us on a whim - His, not anyone else's; as it should be.
-e.j. winner

I might have expected an invocation of Almighty justice much sooner than at the tail-end of Mr. Winner's comment, which confuses a discussion of what to do about nuclear escalationism and Professor Byrd's fatuous claim that there is nothing to choose between our own government and the one in Tehran. Actually, re-reading Byrd's original letter, I now notice the allusion to an "Earthly paradise" having been forfeited by allocating resources instead to national defense. What, pray tell, would such an Eden look like? This debate seems more and more a pen-pal program between messianic crackpots.

Byrd plainly states that President Bush is more dangerous than President Ahmadinejad and that the former is "intent" on destroying the latter's part of the world. I'd very much like to know such an unacknowledged legislator arrived at this conclusion. And why he imputes apocalyptic motives to the man with "meager" rhetoric when the man who speaks openly and frequently of wiping whole nations off the map is addressed as more of a pigmified nuisance than a major threat to humanity?

Mr. Winner is entitled to his charming opinion that this anxious and desperate confession begs the question of whether we must destroy the world in order to come to our senses (good luck trying that even in the conceptual phase, by the way). But if Ahmadinejad's beliefs and his articulated plan for a Shia utopia are irrelevant to the central purpose of this correspondence, why both writing a letter back to him at all?

Lastly, I'm honored to know that even in being described as a "white American," I can still somehow count myself a "victim" in Winner's epistemology. Must be yet another magic trick of neoconservatives.