It was just over two years ago that Barack Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois with aspirations to the presidency, famously pronounced, that he would be willing to hold direct talks, without preconditions, with the president of Iran.

This week, President Obama will have the chance to do just that, when Iran’s fiery, Israel-bashing, legitimacy-challenged president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, joins Obama and other world leaders to speak at the first United Nations General Assembly in the new kinder, gentler, Barack Obama era.

And guess what? Administration officials

will be doing everything in their power to make sure the two don’t get within spitting distance of each other.

“You’ve got to get the Secret Service to put stumbling blocks in the way,” said Ray Takeyh, until last month a senior adviser for Iran at the State Department. “You’ve got to quarantine that off. You’ve got to make sure to avoid any kind of chance encounter with Ahmadinejad.”

A senior White House official was equally adamant. “Having Ahmadinejad meet Obama — that’s just not going to happen,” he said. “You saw the events of the Iranian election and its aftermath. There’s a nuclear reality that has to be dealt with, it’s hard not to be affected by what we saw.”

Translation: after watching Iranian protestors be brutalised on the streets of Tehran by government forces making sure that Ahmadinejad was retained as president, the last place Obama wants to be caught is anywhere near the Iranian leader. Even the barest handshake between the West’s most popular political figure and one of its most reviled political foes could deflate Iran’s nascent political opposition, give conservative hawks in the United States even more to lambast the president for, and send Israel over the edge.

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