The Price of Unity
Over at Bull Moose, Marshall Wittmann is accusing the President of having essentially sold out to the Iranians.
And I grant you that reading the terms of the offer made to Tehran is enough to make one queasy. I'll further stipulate that if John Kerry had offered the same deal, I'd be very, very alarmed.
The reason that I'm willing to give the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt, however, is because of their history. Unlike the Democrats, I've seen no evidence that the Bush Administration either doesn't understand the terrorist threat or isn't taking it seriously. The same goes for the possibility of a nuclear Iran.
Just as only Nixon could go to China, the left in the US would forgive Kerry if he had decided to ignore the UN and deal with Iran on the US's own terms (not that he ever would have). But if President Bush does the same thing, he'll be portrayed as a "warmonger," just as he was when he took it upon himself with the "coalition of the willing" to enforce the UN resolutions that the UN itself refused to take seriously.
And so President Bush is working with other countries -- maybe to stop Iran, maybe simply to show them that Iran doesn't intend to be stopped no matter what the US offers. Couldn't he be playing a page from the playbook inadvertantly written by Ehud Barak in his 2000 negotiations with Yasser Arafat?
And I grant you that reading the terms of the offer made to Tehran is enough to make one queasy. I'll further stipulate that if John Kerry had offered the same deal, I'd be very, very alarmed.
The reason that I'm willing to give the Bush Administration the benefit of the doubt, however, is because of their history. Unlike the Democrats, I've seen no evidence that the Bush Administration either doesn't understand the terrorist threat or isn't taking it seriously. The same goes for the possibility of a nuclear Iran.
Just as only Nixon could go to China, the left in the US would forgive Kerry if he had decided to ignore the UN and deal with Iran on the US's own terms (not that he ever would have). But if President Bush does the same thing, he'll be portrayed as a "warmonger," just as he was when he took it upon himself with the "coalition of the willing" to enforce the UN resolutions that the UN itself refused to take seriously.
And so President Bush is working with other countries -- maybe to stop Iran, maybe simply to show them that Iran doesn't intend to be stopped no matter what the US offers. Couldn't he be playing a page from the playbook inadvertantly written by Ehud Barak in his 2000 negotiations with Yasser Arafat?
posted by LadybugUSA at 10:11 AM
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