The Snub.

By NANCY GIBBS

If diplomacy is the art of stroking your enemies right up until the moment you're ready to strike them, the snub is a handy little act of war by other means. Handled correctly, it visibly treats its target as invisible. Thus did Laura Bush proceed to her seat in the U.N. General Assembly, steadying herself on the desk occupied by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but apparently ignoring him as he glanced her way. "The despondent despot," gloated the New York Post, "immediately lowered his head again" and sat back to look at his watch and listen as President Bush, in a speech, lambasted Iran's "brutal and repressive" regime. It was left to the Cuban Foreign Minister to snub Bush in turn by walking out on his speech.

All the world's a stage when the General Assembly comes to town, and Ahmadinejad strutted and fretted plenty. He was snubbed first by the city of New York when he proposed laying a wreath at ground zero. No can do, police said; too big a security risk, which was rather delicately put, given how revolted New Yorkers were by the prospect of a tyrant's hand touching sacred ground. Next came Columbia University's president, Lee Bollinger, who managed to outrage just about everyone either for inviting Ahmadinejad to speak or for insulting him before he had a chance to. As it turned out, Bollinger's "vaccination" was unnecessary, since the Iranian's own remarks did a much better job of showing his foolishness.

But it is at the U.N., where talking is taken as a form of action, that theater most often becomes absurd: the shoe banged on the table, the smell of sulfur in the room. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, star of last year's show, skipped the session this year, perhaps to tend to a new state-owned movie studio designed to help break "the dictatorship of Hollywood." But he did take time out to call his Iranian friend and compliment him for standing up to the Great Satan. And it all occurred in a week when Burmese monks were in the streets risking their lives for freedom, their actions speaking far louder than any words.