Don't know much about history--Obama edition
...Obama is closer to the failed policies of the Carter administration than the three he named. It was Carter that tried to engage the Ayatollahs in a dialog. However, they were not interested in a deal, they were just interested in destroying us like the current regime in Tehran. Talking with them is not going to change the dynamic.
In defending his stated intent to meet with America's enemies without preconditions, Sen. Obama said: "I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did."
...I assume the Roosevelt to whom Sen. Obama referred is Franklin D. Roosevelt. Our enemies in World War II were Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler; fascist Italy, headed by Benito Mussolini, and militarist Japan, headed by Hideki Tojo. FDR talked directly with none of them before the outbreak of hostilities, and his policy once war began was unconditional surrender.
FDR died before victory was achieved, and was succeeded by Harry Truman. Truman did not modify the policy of unconditional surrender. He ended that war not with negotiation, but with the atomic bomb.
Harry Truman also was president when North Korea invaded South Korea in June, 1950. President Truman's response was not to call up North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for a chat. It was to send troops.
Perhaps Sen. Obama is thinking of the meeting FDR and Churchill had with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in Tehran in December, 1943, and the meetings Truman and Roosevelt had with Stalin at Yalta and Potsdam in February and July, 1945. But Stalin was then a U.S. ally, though one of whom we should have been more wary than FDR and Truman were. Few historians think the agreements reached at Yalta and Potsdam, which in effect consigned Eastern Europe to slavery, are diplomatic models we ought to follow. Even fewer Eastern Europeans think so.
When Stalin's designs became unmistakably clear, President Truman's response wasn't to seek a summit meeting. He sent military aid to Greece, ordered the Berlin airlift and the Marshall Plan, and sent troops to South Korea.
Sen. Obama is on both sounder and softer ground with regard to John F. Kennedy. The new president held a summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in June, 1961.
Elie Abel, who wrote a history of the Cuban missile crisis (The Missiles of October), said the crisis had its genesis in that summit.
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Ed Morrissey says Neville Chamberlain is a closer comparison.
Merve,
ReplyDeleteTo me, the most interesting thing about the context of Senator Obama's strange claim about Roosevelt, Kennedy and Truman, lay in the fact that he specifically said he would be doing this as part of his commitment to tell the people the truth.
Warning of the "old" politics, which he claimed the Republicans would pursue in the fall campaign, Obama said,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/06/AR2008050603099_pf.html
(transcript here):
"We will end it by telling the truth.
(APPLAUSE)
We will end it by telling the truth forcefully, repeatedly, confidently, and by trusting that the American people will embrace the need for change, even if it's coming from an imperfect messenger, because that's how we've -- that's -- because that's how we've always changed this country, not from the top down, but from the bottom up, when you, the American people, decide that the stakes are too high and the challenges are too great.
The other side can label and name-call all they want, but I trust the American people to recognize that it is not surrender to end the war in Iraq so that we can rebuild our military and go after Al Qaida's leaders.
I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did."
Look, this guy Obama was the President of the Harvard Law Review. An abiding commitment to research scholarship and confirmation of anything said or written, lies at the heart of the mission of any such editorial board. He simply cannot be ignorant of the basic facts of modern American history; he knew full well that that statement was false. He said it only because it fit the political narrative he is pursuing.
He knows full well that Roosevelt never talked to Hitler or Tojo or Mussolini. And he knows that Harry Truman never went hat in hand to the Chinese Communists or to the North Koreans.