Bush's Bizarro World

Bush’s Bizarro World
by Ted Galen Carpenter

05.19.2008

President Bush's speech to the Israeli Knesset, in which he charged that people who advocate negotiating with "terrorists and radicals" are the equivalent of craven Western leaders who sought to appease Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s, has created a political firestorm. Critics immediately accused Bush of smearing Barack Obama, who had previously indicated that he was willing to open a dialogue with such countries as Iran and Syria. More broadly, liberals asserted that Bush was smearing anyone who supported talking to repressive regimes as weak-kneed appeasers.

Those criticisms are justified. Bush's comments were a cheap shot, and as much as the White House and Republican leaders assert that they were not directed at Obama, it is doubtful if even Laura Bush believes that denial. The invocation of the shopworn "appeasement" slur, however, is not the most-troubling aspect of Bush's argument. There are three other, even-more-serious problems with his reasoning.

First, the president equates merely talking to adversaries with appeasement. But appeasement implies far more than just dialogue. It requires the willingness to make far-reaching and (by implication, at least) utterly unwise concessions. There is no evidence that Obama or other advocates of dialogue with repressive regimes are necessarily prepared to make such concessions.

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Second, President Bush appears to violate his own rule against negotiating with terrorists and radicals. After all, the president and his supporters cite the agreement with Libya to end that country's nuclear program as one of the administration's major foreign-policy successes. Yet Libya was a prominent sponsor of terrorism—a record that impelled the United States to bomb Tripoli and other targets during the Reagan years. According to the president's own criteria, the United States should not have been negotiating with the Libyan regime. If we had not done so, however, the world might today be confronting yet another nuclear-proliferation crisis, in addition to those involving Iran and North Korea.

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Finally, Bush's linkage of "terrorists and radicals" like political conjoined twins shows sloppy thinking, and it certainly obscures more than it illuminates. Such a blanket category conflates two difficult but different foreign-policy challenges facing the United States. It probably would be pointless to open a dialogue with terrorist nonstate actors like al-Qaeda. But negotiating with important countries, however repulsive we might find their regimes, is another matter entirely. Whether we like it or not, Iran is a crucial player in the Persian Gulf region—and, indeed, in the entire Middle East. There will be no progress on an array of troublesome issues without Iran's involvement and cooperation. Syria may be a lesser power, but it too is an actor that cannot be ignored.

- rest at www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9412