Putting the Dems on defense on national security

NY Times:

As the bitter Democratic presidential nomination battle was consumed by rancorous maneuverings, Senator John McCain honed his national security message before Jewish leaders on Monday, saying Senator Barack Obama’s policies toward Iraq and Iran would create chaos in the Middle East and endanger the United States and Israel.

Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has been laying out a series of foreign policy attacks on Mr. Obama, his likely Democratic rival, questioning the wisdom of Mr. Obama’s call for making diplomatic overtures to enemies and repeatedly painting him as inexperienced. The McCain campaign has been trying to take advantage of divisions in the Democratic Party and define Mr. Obama, who is still largely unknown to many voters, before he can lock up the nomination, when most of Mr. McCain’s advisers expect him to get a significant bounce in the polls.

Speaking on Monday morning in Washington to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel lobby, Mr. McCain charged that Mr. Obama’s prescription for more diplomacy with Iran was misguided and insufficient, and that his proposal to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq would endanger Israel. Mr. McCain got several standing ovations from the group, which seemed receptive to some of his more hawkish statements, especially on Iran and the threat it poses to Israel.

Some of Mr. McCain’s main points of attack on Mr. Obama — including criticism of Mr. Obama’s previous statement that he would meet with leaders of enemy nations without preconditions — were amplified, sharpened versions of attacks that have been leveled at Mr. Obama by his main Democratic rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. McCain’s voice seemed to drip with sarcasm at times, as when he spoke of Mr. Obama’s call for more diplomacy with Iran.

“We hear talk of a meeting with the Iranian leadership offered up as if it were some sudden inspiration, a bold new idea that somehow nobody has ever thought of before,” Mr. McCain said. “Yet it’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another.”

The Obama campaign countered that Mr. McCain “stubbornly insists on continuing a dangerous and failed foreign policy that has clearly made the United States and Israel less secure,” and added that during the Bush administration Iran made gains with its nuclear program and expanded its influence in the region through groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.

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Obama has been talking in the Democrat echo chamber for over a year and has never been seriously challenged on his goofy foreign policy positions and his ignorance of warfare. That is changing in a hurry. During most of the Democrat debate, President Bush did not bother to respond to the insipid attacks of the Democrats on our war policies. I think that was a mistake, but it is one that McCain is not going to repeat.

The Democrat ridiculous insistence that the Iraq war has strengthened Iran will not go unchallenged. Certainly Iran does not think it has been strengthened by our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. It thinks it is being surrounded by hostile forces that it is too weak to take on directly.