Election 2008

The fireworks started when President Bush spoke to the Knesset, but the fuse had been in plain sight just waiting for a match. The debate over direct talks with Iran, one of the main foreign policy disagreements among Democrats campaigning to be President, is nothing if not an open invitation to Republicans to jump in. John McCain on occasion has done so. But today, instead of John McCain starting the polemic, it was Bush himself, in Israel, with a play to a foreign grandstand.

Without mentioning Obama by name, Bush told the Knesset:

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

There is a chance — a very small one — that Bush did not intend to light the match. But when you’re the President of the United States, giving a prepared speech before the Israeli parliament, and accuse “some” people of behaving like Neville Chamberlain, it doesn’t get overlooked. In the time-honored traditions of Washington politics, you don’t name the target of your attack, you just describe it. Then, depending on your acting skills, you feign surprise.
The White House denied afterward that the President was referring to Obama, but even McCain seemed to think he was. Obama, said McCain, “needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terrorism, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, that wants to wipe Israel off the map, who denies the Holocaust. That’s what I think Senator Obama ought to explain to the American people.’’

Many statements in a political contest can be parsed in a blatantly subjective way. The way Obama refers to McCain’s statement about having troops in Iraq for a hundred years is an example of this. McCain clearly isn’t interested in a hundred years’ war. (Yesterday, in fact, he said he would end the war in four years.)

But, clearly, the general sense of Obama’s call for diplomatic contacts with Iran is to give priority to tough diplomatic work — not appeasement.

Indeed, as Obama pointed out later today, Bush’s own Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, said earlier this week that “We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them… . If there is going to be a discussion then they need something, too,” he said. “We can’t go to a discussion and be completely the ‘demandeur’ with them not feeling they do not need anything from us.”

A rather ingenious argument.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 4:17 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.