We Need To Talk

There is a tendency of the worst administration ever to make a show of manly behavior which as equated with ignorance. What would have been viewed as blundering in more balanced times becomes the prancing behavior of the cretinous Leader of the Free World.

That the behavior itself is repulsive is beside the point. It has made our country the laughingstock of the world, and back to square one as a nation on training wheels. The voters are showing that they can see beyond the propaganda war the recidivists have waged against common sense, by the election results in Mississippi, Louisiana and Illinois.

More than laughable, though, the blunderbus approach is a danger to this country, now and in the future. It demonstrates the incapacity of the administration to deal with international concerns, with functional diplomats.

For much of the 20th century, the United States engaged in the smart, yet difficult diplomacy with adversaries that's as much a key to protecting U.S. interests as military force. Among the notable successes were President Nixon's opening to China and years of high-level negotiations with Soviet leaders that helped prevent a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War.

Given that history, it's disturbing that President Bush, in an overseas salvo amplified at home by GOP presidential nominee John McCain, reduced U.S. diplomacy to a simplistic assertion that talking to "terrorists and radicals" endangers the United States and puts anyone who does so in the sorry tradition of those who appeased Adolf Hitler.

The politics of what's going on here are pretty simple. It's presidential election season, and the person being painted as that weak appeaser is Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama, who quickly counterattacked.

Given Obama's promise to pull out of Iraq within 16 months and his willingness to meet personally with leaders of renegade nations such as Iran and North Korea, the subject is solid ground for debate. A new president must be extremely wary of walking into traps, negotiating without leverage or attending summits without groundwork. But to demonize the whole concept of talking to enemies is preposterous.
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Americans, and national security, are better served by a real debate about the international dilemmas that will confront the next president, not an intelligence-insulting pseudo debate about talking, or not talking, to bad guys.

The cretin in chief, in demonstrating, constantly, how easily he gives up this country's best interests for political ends, gives this country's enemies a very good tool to use against us. He has already done more for the al Qaeda group than it ever could have accomplished without his use of it as a bugaboo. Ascribing supernatural cunning and power to the ragtag bunch has given it stature that it never could have attained without his propaganda, and his unrelated war on Iraq.

Just for the contrast, there is a diplomatic move in the works that should shame anyone who's party to the occupied White House efforts to make political hay out of Middle Eastern conflict.

Fatah and Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti has been in Israeli prison for more than six years now. Four years have passed since he was convicted of five counts of murder and an attempted murder and sentenced to five prison terms and another 40 years.

Barghouti, who turned the Tanzim, the Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, into a real terror group responsible for many attacks on Israelis in the second Intifada, is considered by influential security officials in Israel as the only Palestinian leader capable of stopping Hamas’ expansion and take over of the West Bank.

Indeed, as of late senior officials are starting to recognize that there would be no escaping the need to release him in the near future (perhaps in the prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit) despite the harsh verdict and the serious crimes he was convicted of.

The release of a terrorist in order to give the opposition a capacity to deal, a capacity that the nation of Israel needs them to have, is a concept it will be interesting to see this bunch of punks deal with. That the war criminals will sell it to the public in some form of swill is a given. Let's see, can they invent a reform - a miraculous conversion, even - that was accomplished by aggressive interrogation? Will Barghouti be presented as the present-day Paul, turned by an appearance on the part of an Old Testament God from persecuting the west into its prophet?

Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the war room as the Know-Nothings plot their public announcement of the artwork of diplomacy Barghouti's release will be.