Be sure and read it all. Here's a taste.
Americans are famous for their diversity, and nowhere is this diversity more on display than in the various ways we celebrate the Fourth of July. Whether you are a traditional infidel enjoying hot dogs and cold watermelon, a recent immigrant infidel celebrating your new citizenship with a colorful piñata full of sweet treats, or like me, a not-as-yet-arrived-there-American who celebrates our independence through videotaped beheadings, we Americans have an almost infinite variety of ways of ‘lighting up the Fourth.’
Let me help you understand this complex matter:
ReplyDeleteAnd, then, secondly, there's a bit of hypocrisy here because merely talking with our enemies, that's something that Ronald Reagan has done with the Soviet Union, Richard Nixon did with China. John McCain advocated just a few years ago that we should be talking with Hamas. The issue, it becomes appeasement only when you're under threat and you give something away. When you give something away, that's very different from talking with your enemies and I think that's why, perhaps, on an intellectual level, John McCain loses here.
and:
I guess President Bush must think Defense Secretary Bob Gates is an appeaser of terrorists. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, too. And U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker, as well.
What else is one to conclude from the president's remarks Thursday at the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, where he proclaimed: "Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them." After a reference to Nazi tanks rolling into Poland, the president continued: "We have an obligation to call this what it is - the false comfort of appeasement."
No doubt Bush's jab was aimed at Sen. Barack Obama, who has called for unconditional talks with Tehran. Yet Bush's own team seems as interested in broad talks with Iran as the senator from Illinois.
Last week, Gates told the American Academy of Diplomacy: "We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them."
In January, Rice - speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland - said that, if Tehran would halt its uranium-enrichment program, she'd meet her Iranian counterpart "any place, any time, anywhere to talk about anything." And Crocker, on instructions from Washington, has held three meetings with Iran's ambassador to Baghdad.
So is the president going to oust his top foreign policy team? Of course not. In a stunning display of chutzpah, Bush compares Obama to Neville Chamberlain, but hasn't banned his own team from talking with representatives of Iran.
What makes the president's remarks even more hypocritical is the abject failure of his own Iran policy. No one has strengthened Iran's hand more in the Mideast than George W. Bush.
The Bush team totally failed to foresee that the ouster of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein - the two key enemies of Iran's ayatollahs - would make Tehran the strongest player in the region. Nor did the U.S. team grasp how much influence Iran would inevitably wield with a Shiite-led government in Iraq.