Appeasement

I know it's a little bit late already, but I really wanted to discuss this.
Bush's speech to the the Knesset was overall a beautiful speech, and I don't generally have too many kind words to say about Bush. However, his unfortunate comments about appeasement were truly a disgrace. When a president of the United States is visiting a foreign country, they are a representative of our country, not of their political party, and it is simply not the place to be making partisan political points. I will grant it's not entirely clear he was talking about Barack Obama. He may, for instance, have been talking about Jimmy Carter. However, anyone who's been around politics long enough is aware that "There are those" is always code for "My political opponents" in a way that can give you plausible deniability when accused of negative campaigning and put your opponents on the defensive.

Beyond the disgrace of politicizing a speech to a foreign government is the sheer factual inaccuracy of the comment. We can argue over the wisdom of talking with our enemies (and I will address this shortly), but equating it with the appeasement of Hitler is just not true. When we talk about the Munich conference, the appeasement was not in the fact that we were talking to Hitler, it was in the fact that we gave him parts of Czechoslovakia. The real irony in all this, is that when it come to his policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush has been one of the worse appeasers of all time. Sure, he'll make real tough speeches, and have his minions on the right go out and deliver talking points about he's the best friend Israel has ever had, and how the Democrats can't be trusted, but his actions simply do not match his rhetoric. In the face of Palestinian terrorism, Bush and his administration have continuously pressured Israel to remove security fences, stop settlement growth, and remove checkpoints at border crossings as "gestures of good faith." Well, while talking with terrorists might not be appeasement, gestures of good faith to them certainly are. Whatever decline there's been in terrorism is certainly not the result of Bush's policies, but of Ariel Sharon's wisdom in ignoring them.

But what about this issue of talking itself? I must say, when I first heard the idea, I was skeptical. As I've said before, I was a Clinton supporter, and was far more sympathetic to her position. However, the more I've researched the idea, the more I like it. As others have already pointed out numerous times, there really is nothing radical in the proposal. Presidents from Kennedy to Nixon to Reagan met with the leaders of China or the Soviet Union. (As an aside, if John McCain thinks Iran is a bigger threat than the Soviet Union was, he's either delusional, or has no understanding of foreign policy, or as I suspect, both. The Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. Iran is only trying to get them. I will grant that if they ever actually got them, they could be more dangerous than the Soviet Union was, but currently they're not even close.) The one thing else I'd like to add is that Obama's proposal really reminds me of the aphorism of one of John McCain's political heroes, Teddy Roosevelt. "Speak softly and carry a big stick." The military option's always on the table, and when you go in to negotiate, you make sure they know that, and then you see what concessions you can get out of them. You may get nothing, and have to resort to military actions, but there's nothing lost by talking to them first. As Joe Biden astutely pointed out, "Talking to someone doesn't mean we're giving up our ability to say no to them."

Some people seem to be worried that talking to someone grants them legitimacy. First of all, I don't think it's true. Talking to an enemy doesn't make them any less our enemy. Second of all, I don't think nations like Iran care very much about legitimacy from the US. These people would have you believe that while these nations talk about destroying us, the thing they really seek is our approval. If they cared in the least about our approval, the would have abandoned their bellicose ways a long time ago. Now obviously, if we want to maximize our hope of getting concessions from them, there needs to be significant preparation before the presidential meeting, and Obama has made it clear he would make those. I'm reasonably certain those kinds of lower level meetings are going on even now. They usually happen in secret. One more caveat I should add is I do think there's a different between a President Obama meeting with Iran, and Jimmy Carter meeting with Hamas. First of all, negotiations have to be done with an official representative of the government. Second of all, negotiating with your own enemies is one thing, but going behind your ally's back to negotiate with their enemies without them being involved, could really undercut their position.

Now John McCain at least has been consistent with his position on this issue most of the time. This is the man who criticized Bill Clinton in 1994 for making a deal with North Korea instead of attacking them. The man has no tolerance for evil in the world and thinks the only appropriate response is to destroy it militarily. There's a certain quixotic nobility to the position. I wish we could just destroy all evil in the world too. However, we're not all-powerful and it isn't a world of absolutes. Sometimes we need to cut deals with people we don't like to get the lesser of 2 evils. This certainly seems preferable to all out war with North Korea. The more I listen to the candidates, the more I am convinced that Obama understands the realities of the world and offers a progressive, pragmatic approach for dealing with them, whereas John McCain's approach is "simplistic" and "dangerously naive."