Bush-Obama-McCain and Appeasement

The White House now claims that President Bush's infamous remarks to the Israeli Knesset yesterday, likening those who propose direct talks with Iran and Islamist terrorist groups to the appeasers of Nazi Germany, were addressed not at Barack Obama but at Jimmy Carter.

This would be plausible, on its face, if it weren't for the fact that it's taken them a whole day to come up with it.  President Bush may not be the world's most coherent speaker, but it's natural to be suspicious when it takes someone more than a day to figure out what he was talking about.

.

The big problem with it is not that it is rather unseemly for a president to attack his domestic critics on foreign soil, though it is that.  It is not even that his remarks were a rather extreme distortion of what Obama actually proposes, though they were that too. The biggest problem is that his sweeping denunciation of appeasers should, taken to its logical conclusion, embrace not only the usual lily-livered Democrats, but many Republican foreign policy experts, some members of his own administration, and it now seems, the likely Republican nominee for president.

Noted neocon foreign policy types Reuel Gerecht and Bob Kagan have both called for talks with Iran over Iraq; Defense Secretary Robert Gates used to argue for it, and President Bush's own team in Baghdad have already begun tentative talks with the Iranians and some of their surrogates in iraq.

As for John McCain, it's obviously embarassing, to put it mildly, that it now appears that he too, not so long ago, supported dealing with Hamas

I can't help but think that all this might be proof of something Newt Gingrich suggested a couple of weeks ago. if Republicans think they can win this election by attacking Obama on the usual grounds that he's a weak-kneed friend of terrorists and appeasers,  they are sorely wrong.  The Republicans' own record on national security is now so badly damaged that for them to claim that the Democrats can't be trusted sounds to most ears like that old definition of chutzpah - the child who murders both his parents and then claims the law's protection because he's an orphan.