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Ready on Day One?

By Dean Barnett
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Now the Grey Lady waddles in, desperately trying to make sense of Barack Obama’s hyper-nuanced pledge to chat with foreign despots. Yet even the Grey Lady seems to be scratching her head.

This week, Mr. Obama said that he was still considering meeting with Iranian leaders, though he would not necessarily guarantee a direct meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad. “There is no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad before we know that he is actually in power,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “He is not the most powerful person in Iran.” Last week, Mr. Obama offered a similarly nuanced explanation about meeting with President Raúl Castro of Cuba, saying he would do so only “at a time and place of my choosing.” The caveats belie the simple answer Mr. Obama gave during a debate last summer, when the issue was first raised in a major public forum. Without hesitation or qualification, Mr. Obama said he would hold direct talks with America’s enemies, drawing strong and immediate criticism from his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Of course, no story of this sort would be complete without Obama displaying a dollop of smug, self-satisfied ignorance:

“I think that it is an example of how stunted our foreign policy debates have become over the last eight years that this is an issue that political opponents try to seize on,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on Wednesday. “It is actually a pretty conventional view of how diplomacy should work traditionally that has fallen into disrepute in Republican circles and in Washington.”

Predictably, Obama has it perfectly wrong again. It’s true that Reagan met with Gorbachev, but he didn’t meet with Daniel Ortega, Fidel Castro, the Ayatollah Khomeini or Daffy Khadaffy. Actually, he did sort of meet with Khadaffy, but I don’t think that’s the sort of meeting that Obama has in mind. Believe it or not, Bill Clinton was cut from a similar cloth. During his eight intern-chasing years in the Oval Office, he didn’t make time to personally meet with Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il although he did dispatch Jimmy Carter as an emissary to appease the former. Clinton also didn’t meet with Saddam Hussein or the crackpots who were running Iran. So Clinton didn’t subscribe to Obama’s so-called “conventional view.” Perhaps Obama was referring to the legendary Jimmy Carter/Ayatollah Khomeini summit. Or maybe the Eisenhower/Castro sit down? It’s rather amazing that Obama can’t distinguish between direct presidential diplomacy and sending a Bill Richardson-type shlub to chat with a dictator. It’s even more amazing that as wrong as he is, he still thinks he’s the only person out there with a proper understanding of this corner of diplomatic history.

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