Today I went to the Brookings Institution to listen to their roundtable discussion on Iran.  To say I was underwhelmed would be an overstatement.

The event began with Kenneth Pollack giving a juvenile powerpoint presentation using some template from Office ’95.  C’mon Kenny, step it up.  Plus, it’s 2009.  Powerpoints don’t impress anyone anymore.  Prepare a speech next time.

Then, I listened to their five “experts”- Pollack, Riedel, O’Hanlon, Daniel Byman, and Suzanne Maloney talk for an hour and half, during which they managed to say NOTHING.  Oh, there were subjects and verbs.  But nothing that I couldn’t have learned from reading a stock AP filing on the subject.

I’m convinced that these prestigious senior fellow positions at Brookings are just sinecures, and these guys aren’t actually preparing for these meetings or doing much new research.  They just rest on their laurels, and this is probably why new foreign policy think tanks open up every month. 

Bruce Riedel (who I actually like a lot) and Kenneth Pollack (good writer, bad ideas; see “The Threatening Storm”) might have a million years of combined CIA experience on Iran, but I could have learned much more by spending five minutes reading Andrew Sullivan.  

Suzanne Maloney, one of the panelists, did seem to know her stuff. She also appeared to be fluent in Farsi.  Respect.  But then Martin Indyk, who moderated, asked the final question: Who will be president of Iran in 3 years? 

In the same unimaginative and drab fashion that characterized the entire affair, all of the of panelists said Ahmadinajad. 

Well, you heard it here first: Ahmadinejad WILL NOT still be president of Iran in 3 years.  More on that later.  

- Jon