Obama Relies On Lie After Lie to Sell His Toughness On Iran

McCain has an ad about Obama and the threat of Iran running:

The script reads: “Iran. Radical Islamic government. Known sponsors of terrorism. Developing nuclear capabilities to ‘generate power’ but threatening to eliminate Israel.

“Obama says Iran is a ‘tiny’ country, ‘doesn’t pose a serious threat,'” the ad continues. “Terrorism, destroying Israel, those aren’t ‘serious threats’? Obama — dangerously unprepared to be president.”

Not everyone is happy with the ad.  Jake Tapper of ABC says it’s “dishonest” (and I like Jake and often agree with him).  Jake goes into an examination of the word “tiny” and concludes that Obama was misrepresented.

Tapper has the courtesy to re-state Obama’s actual words for us:

On May 18, in Pendelton, Ore., Obama said that “strong countries and strong presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny, compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet, we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, ‘We’re going to wipe you off the planet.’

“And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time, allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall,” Obama continued. “Now, that has to be the kind of approach that we take. You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have, to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. That doesn’t mean we agree with them on everything. We might not compromise on any issues, but at least we should find out other areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that has caused us so many problems around the world.”

I’ll let you be the judge whether McCain’s characterization of Obama as referring to Iran as a “tiny” country that doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us.”  Frankly, it seems to me that Obama essentially does both things.

I would argue that, in comparing Iran to the Soviet Union, and using the comparison to state that “Iran doesn’t pose a serious threat to us the way the way the Soviet Union did” is clearly tantamount to diminishing Iran as a serious threat.

I mean, stop and think about it for a second: by that measurement, every country in the world is “tiny,” and no country in the world today (including Russia today, and including China) is capable of representing a “serious threat” to us.  The Soviet Union was massive.  And they had the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world in addition to having the world’s most powerful military.  The United States today is often called the world’s only remaining superpower because no country has ever risen to replace the power of the Soviet Union of old.

So forgive me for fixating more on what Barrack Obama essentially does: trivialize the nation of Iran.

If the ad “misrepresents” Obama’s position, it’s only because it’s such a bizarre and such a long-winded statement that it would be hard NOT to misrepresent it.

In any event, Obama – claiming the ad misrepresents him – proceeds to misrepresent reality itself:

Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan responds:

“John McCain is distorting Barack Obama’s words to cover up for the fact that it’s the failed Bush-McCain approach to foreign policy and the Bush-McCain war in Iraq that that have strengthened Iran and endangered Israel. While Barack Obama recognizes that Iran has been the biggest beneficiary of the war in Iraq and that the Bush-McCain fear of tough diplomacy has allowed Iran to spin 3800 centrifuges, threaten Israel, and fund terrorism, John McCain promises more of the same. If John McCain was serious about dealing with the threat from Iran, he would join Barack Obama’s bipartisan effort in the Senate to step up sanctions on Iran instead of adopting the same tired, old Bush-Rove playbook.”

Let me start with the assertion that the war in Iraq strengthened Iran.  An analysis of the NIE Intelligence report provides this conclusion:

Instead, if the intelligence of the NIE is correct, it demonstrates that Iran halted its program in 2003, likely because it perceived a U.S. attack highly probable and did not want to provide Washington with evidence of a nuclear weapon gambit. Furthermore, in 2003 and early 2004, the situation in Iraq was still relatively stable, and Tehran probably perceived a U.S. attack on its nuclear facilities or government a possibility.

The simple fact of the matter is that Iran stopped its nuclear program – which obviously means that it had previously HAD a nuclear program – immediately after the United States attacked Iraq.  Why?  Because they didn’t want to be next, that’s why.  And the question that logically follows is, so why did they restart their nuclear program?  And the single answer is, “Because Democrats so divided this country that Iran saw weakness.”  Democrats had supported the confrontation with Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein.  Then – when it became politically expedient to do so – they abandoned their previous commitments and began demonizing their president in a time of war.

Think about it: Democrats went from supporting the war to the extent that fully 60% of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted to pass the Iraq War Resolution, and the war authorization actually passed in both the House and Senate by wider margins than did the 1991 Gulf War Resolution.  And then they turned against it in a backstabbing fashion.  And they hyped and dramatized every negative thing about the war.  The Democratic leader of the United States Senate said, “I believe that this war is lost.“  And in 2006 they ran on their opposition to the war.  They won the House and the Senate with promises to end the war in defeat and run home.  Now, at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, there is barely a single mention of the Iraq War that had so consumed them previously.  Why?  Because the war is going well now, and, in contradiction to the treasonous statement by Harry Reid, we are winning the war.  Democrats aren’t mentioning the war now because it isn’t advantageous to them.  They are cowards who can’t be trusted.  They will cut and run the moment it’s expedient for them.

As for the Obama camp’s statement that “Bush-McCain” (which itself is a terrible misrepresentation, given the fact that McCain is NOT PART OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION) endangered Israel, apparently Israelis want to continue to be endangered by Republican leaders, with a solid majority favoring McCain over Obama.  So that would seem to be another clear misrepresentation.

Then the Obama campaign says something that is truly warped: “the Bush-McCain fear of tough diplomacy has allowed Iran to spin 3800 centrifuges, threaten Israel, and fund terrorism, John McCain promises more of the same.”  Oh?  Did I miss that McCain stump speech?  (“And, if elected, I promise to allow Iran to continue to develop nuclear weapons, threaten Israel, and fund terrorism“).  You want to talk about misrepresentations and lies?

Barack Obama pitches his “tough diplomacy” (the way Barney Fife pitched his toughness as the town of Mayberry’s deputy sheriff).  Obama excoriates Bush and McCain for not using diplomacy.  But two things: 1) diplomacy is being tried, and 2) it is not working:

More depressing news from Tehran over the weekend to deepen the gloom of this rainy morning in London. The Iranian government has given strong indications that it had no desire to engage in a constructive diplomatic dialogue with the world’s leading powers despite the fact that, as my colleague David Blair wrote in last week’s Daily Telegraph, the offer EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana made when he visited Tehran last month was more than reasonable. In return for easing the economic pressure on Tehran, all the West asked was that Iran froze its uranium enrichment activity at its current levels which, if Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, as it consistently claims, peaceful, should not be a problem.

But government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham said on Saturday that Iran’s stance on its nuclear programme remains unchanged and that Tehran has no desire to accept the international package of incentives offered to it in order for a cessation of its nuclear work.

This is bad news indeed for all those – myself included – who would like to see the Iranian crisis resolved by diplomacy.

Here’s a Middle Eastern news article from just today, saying:

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed later on Monday that Tehran will never give up its nuclear program despite the risk of fresh sanctions.

Pardon me for not being awed by Obama’s muscle flexing.  It reveals that he is too skinny to be President.

But Obama feeds us yet another lie, that neither Bush nor McCain would pursue diplomacy.  One most definitely has, the other most definitely would.  The difference between McCain and Obama is that McCain would go beyond talk when diplomacy failed.  Talk is all Barack Obama has ever done, and it is all he has ever been good at.

Will Barack Obama go to war with Iran if they continue to develop nuclear weapons?  Or can we rest easy, knowing that Obama’s extensive foreign diplomacy skills (which have never failed, it is true, given that they have never been tried) will surely prevail?  Will this man, who called for us to withdraw from Iraq when withdrawing would have meant certain defeat, who refused to fight from the beginning, stand up when all the diplomacy fails and do what is necessary to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons?  There is absolutely nothing in his feeble little weak and pandering history to suggest that he will.

And the ONLY way Iran will blink is if they truly believe that we are serious about using EVERY option to stop them from ever developing nuclear weapons.

Obama’s complaints that he is being misrepresented and that McCain is lying is the modern day equivalent of the biblical proverb of straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel.  It is frankly astonishing what a massive pile of garbage Obama expects us to gulp down.

Sorry, but if Jake Tapper doesn’t criticize the Obama response with every bit as much enthusiasm as he displayed criticizing the McCain ad, he’s got a credibility problem.

Tags: Barack Obama, Bush-McCain, Democratic convention, eliminate, Harry Reid, Iran, Iraq, Islamic, Israel, John McCain, President, radical, serious threat, Soveit Union, terrorism, tiny, too skinny, unprepared, war is lost