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Karl Rove writes today on Obama’s troubling foreign policy instincts.
… On Wednesday, Mr. Obama said in Florida that in a meeting with the Iranians he’d make it clear their behavior is unacceptable. That message has been delivered clearly by Republican and Democratic administrations in public and private diplomacy over the past 16 years. Is he so naïve to think he has a unique ability to make this even clearer?
If Mr. Obama believes he can change the behavior of these nations by meeting without preconditions, he owes it to the voters to explain, in specific terms, what he can say that will lead these states to abandon their hostility. He also needs to explain why unconditional, unilateral meetings with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korea’s Kim Jong Il will not deeply unsettle our allies.
If Mr. Obama fails to do so, voters may come to believe that he is asking them to accept that he has a “Secret Plan,” and that he is hopelessly out of his depth on national security.
Amir Taheri outlines how Obama’s foolishness has already done extensive damage to Ahmadinejad’s opposition in Iran.
BUOYED by their modest electoral success last month, critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s provocative foreign policy were preparing to launch a series of attacks on him in the Islamic Majlis, Iran’s ersatz parliament. But then Ahmadinejad got an unexpected boost from Barack Obama.
Ali Larijani, Iran’s former nuclear negotiator and now a Majlis member, was arguing that the Islamic Republic would pay a heavy price for Ahmadinejad’s rejection of three UN Security Council resolutions on nukes. Then the likely Democratic presidential nominee stepped in.
Obama announced that, if elected, he wouldn’t ask Iran to comply with UN resolutions as a precondition for direct talks with Ahmadinejad: “Preconditions, as it applies to a country like Iran, for example, was a term of art. Because this administration has been very clear that it will not have direct negotiations with Iran until Iran has met preconditions that are essentially what Iran views, and many other observers would view, as the subject of the negotiations; for example, their nuclear program.”
“Talking without preconditions” would require America to ignore three unanimous Security Council resolutions. Before starting his unconditional talks, would Obama present a new resolution at the Security Council to cancel the three that Ahmadinejad doesn’t like? Or would the new US president act in defiance of the United Nations – further weakening the Security Council’s authority?
President Bush didn’t set the preconditions that Obama promises to ignore. They were agreed upon after the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran was in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Acting in accordance with its charter, the IAEA referred the issue to the Security Council.
Dismissing the preconditions as irrelevant would mean snubbing America’s European allies plus Russia and China, all of whom participated in drafting and approving the resolutions that Ahmadinejad doesn’t like. …
The NY Times, of all places, has an op-ed on the beating Khrushchev delivered to Kennedy, when the inexperienced president met with the hardened veteran of Stalin’s Soviet Union and WWII’s Eastern Front.
Only a few minutes after parting with Khrushchev, Kennedy, a World War II veteran, told James Reston of The New York Times that the summit meeting had been the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy went on: “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”
A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall. Kennedy had resigned himself to it, telling his aides in private that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The following spring, Khrushchev made plans to “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants”: nuclear missiles in Cuba. And while there were many factors that led to the missile crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that the impression Khrushchev formed at Vienna — of Kennedy as ineffective — was among them.
If Barack Obama wants to follow in Kennedy’s footsteps, he should heed the lesson that Kennedy learned in his first year in office: sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate. …
Jennifer Rubin notes Obama used to sound like McCain or Bush 43.
The Best of the Web (h/t Andy McCarthy) points out that in 2004 Barack Obama sounded a far different note on Iran, declaring:
“[H]aving a radical Muslim theocracy in possession of nuclear weapons is worse. So I guess my instinct would be to err on not having those weapons in the possession of the ruling clerics of Iran. . . . And I hope it doesn’t get to that point. But realistically, as I watch how this thing has evolved, I’d be surprised if Iran blinked at this point.” . . .Obama said that violent Islamic extremists are a vastly different brand of foe than was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they must be treated differently. “With the Soviet Union, you did get the sense that they were operating on a model that we could comprehend in terms of, they don’t want to be blown up, we don’t want to be blown up, so you do game theory and calculate ways to contain,” Obama said. “I think there are certain elements within the Islamic world right now that don’t make those same calculations.” …
Ann Coulter gives her thoughts on Bush’s Knesset speech.
You always know you’ve struck gold when liberals react with hysteria and rage to something you’ve said. So I knew President Bush’s speech at the Knesset last week was a barn burner before even I read it. Liberals haven’t been this worked up since Rev. Jerry Falwell criticized a cartoon sponge.
Calling the fight against terrorism “the defining challenge of our time” — which already confused liberals who think the defining struggle of our time is against Wal-Mart — Bush said:
“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.”
The way liberals squealed, you’d think someone had mentioned Obama’s ears. Summoning all their womanly anger, today’s Neville Chamberlains denounced Bush, saying this was an unjustified attack on Obambi and, furthermore, that it’s absurd to compare B. Hussein Obama’s willingness to “talk” to Ahmadinejad to Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation to Hitler. …
George Will has a great column on the polar bear’s protectors.
… No one can anticipate or control the implications that judges might discover in the polar bear designation. Give litigious environmentalists a compliant judge, and the Endangered Species Act might become what New Dealers wanted the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 to be — authority to regulate almost everything.
What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” — the idea that government can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding — is the left’s agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state’s supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left’s hostility to markets. And to automobiles — people going wherever they want whenever they want.
Today’s “green left” is the old “red left” revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history’s violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.
The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon.
Environmentalism is, as Lawson writes, an unlimited “license to intrude.” “Eco-fundamentalism,” which is “the quasi-religion of green alarmism,” promises “global salvationism.” Onward, green soldiers, into preventive war on behalf of some bears who are simultaneously flourishing and “threatened.”
Perfect lead to Dr. Tim Ball, Canadian environmentalist, on the anti-human agenda of many greens.
A tongue-in-cheek comment from my university said if we could just get rid of the students it would be a great place to work. Some environmentalists think if we could just get rid of all the people on the planet it would be a great place to live. Generally over-population is a major part of the environmentalists’ argument that humans are causing all the problems, including climate change. Satire is a good measure of this position typified by the bumper sticker that says, “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself.”
The relationship between population and resources has been an issue throughout history. All predictions to date were wrong including Thomas Malthus in the 19th century, who claimed the population would outgrow the food supply. The most recent flurry of alarmism over population growth was a key piece of the ideas of the Club of Rome and the now discredited book “Limits to Growth”. It received momentum through Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb.” …
… The English TV comedy series “Yes Minister” had a wonderful episode in which the most efficient and economical hospital was one that had no patients. Well environmentalists don’t harbor those views lightly. Ingrid Newkirk of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said,
“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” “If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species, Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
It’s too bad the dinosaurs or all the other species that became extinct long before Homo Sapiens came on the scene did not know of this. …
Fascinating Corner post by Peter Wehner. Seems even the unrelentingly grotesque New York Review of Books has figured out the frauds behind global warming.
Professor Dyson, a renowned theoretical physicist and mathematician famous for his work in, among other things, quantum mechanics, believes in anthropogenic global warming. But he also believes that there is a dangerous tendency among an increasing number of advocates of global warming to be “dogmatic” and shut down the debate. In that context, the concluding three paragraphs of Dyson’s New York Review of Books essay are worth highlighting: …
Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic has a book on global warming coming out in English next week. Iain Murray Corner post with details.
More proof God has a sense of humor. Burlington Free Press says snow will greet Memorial Day hikers in the People’s Republic of Vermont.