Appeasement at Tehran?
By Bud White on May 24, 2008 at 10:32 AM in Al Qaeda, Anti-Semitism, Barack Obama, Clinton, Counterterrorism, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Israel, John F. Kennedy, Terrorism
The post below was written by Mary Jo Kopechne, PhD, with assistance from Bud White:
Upon being discharged from the Navy, John F. Kennedy worked briefly for the Hearst newspapers covering the newly formed United Nations. He wrote to a friend from San Francisco:
When I think of all those gallant acts that I have seen…it would be a very easy thing to feel disappointed…You have seen battlefields where sacrifice was the order of the day and to compare that sacrifice to the timidity and selfishness of the nations gathered at San Francisco must inevitably be disillusioning.
As a young man, Kennedy understood the realities of realpolitik, the idea that nations work primarily for their own self-interests. To use the parlance of today, Obama’s notion of meeting with your enemies without preconditions is so breathtakingly naive and dangerous that it raises serious concerns about his judgment.
In the May 22nd, op-ed piece from the NYT:
In his inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy expressed in two eloquent sentences, often invoked by Barack Obama, a policy that turned out to be one of his presidency’s — indeed one of the cold war’s — most consequential: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.
On the same day but in a different article, the Times points out that Obama is currently traveling through Florida, where he knows he has problems, and the people interviewed for their piece told the Times:
…they had reservations about Mr. Obama’s stated willingness to negotiate with Iran — whose nuclear ambitions and Holocaust-denying president trigger even starker fears among Jews than intifada uprisings and suicide bombings.
When JFK attempted direct talks in Vienna with Khrushchev, without any preconditions, we all held our breath. Kennedy initially believed he could reason with Khrushchev, while the Soviet leader wanted to debate the merits of communism over capitalism, and insisted that he would sign an agreement with East Germany which in effect would block American access to Berlin.
Khrushchev threatened Kennedy:
If the US wants war, that’s its problem. It’s up to the US to decide whether there will be war or peace. The decision to sign a peace treaty is firm and irrevocable, and the Soviet Union will sign it in December if the US refuses an interim agreement.
To which Kennedy replied:
“Then, Mr. Chairman, there will be a war. It will be a cold, long winter.”
But Obama seems to have forgotten what he may have learned in history class: the negotiations between Kennedy and Khrushchev failed miserably, creating the untenable threat of nuclear war. The Op-ed points to this:
Senator Obama defended his position by again enlisting Kennedy’s legacy: “If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy, because that’s what he did with Khrushchev.”
Iran is perhaps a more perplexing threat than the USSR was when a naïve Kennedy entered into failed negotiations. According to Alan Derschowitz, Israelis fear Iran “could be the first suicide nation, a nation that would destroy itself to destroy the Jewish nation.”
The building of the Berlin Wall not only signified the failure of those negotiations, it also meant we lived in constant fear of attack. In fact, Kennedy’s meeting with Khrushchev only heightened the tension between the USSR and the US, and created the reputation worldwide that the US was putting her allies in danger. We lived on the razor’s edge during that time, aware that Khrushchev found Kennedy “too intelligent and too weak.”
It was after the meeting between the two that Khrushchev decided to place nuclear missiles in Cuba.
As Thrall and Wilkens make clear in their Op-Ed:
But Kennedy’s one presidential meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, suggests that there are legitimate reasons to fear negotiating with one’s adversaries. Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings — his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” — he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.
Khrushchev famously shouted, “We will bury you.” Later, he said, “I once got in trouble for saying, ‘We will bury you.’ Of course, we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.” Words have consequences.
In the same vein but towards Israel, Ahmadinejad said:
Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world
In order to assure the Jewish community that he will defend Israel, Obama is now portraying himself as a quasi Jew. According to Kantor in the Times piece:
Now the half-Kenyan-by-way-of-Hawaii candidate, who only recently completed a beer-and-bowling tour to impress blue-collar Midwesterners, has committed more fully to showing off his inner Jew. He recently made a surprise speech at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and, in the interview with Mr. Goldberg, he told stories about a long-lost Jewish summer camp counselor who taught him about Israel and recalled reading Leon Uris and Philip Roth, arguably opposite poles of American-Jewish fiction.
However, according to Florida Rabbi Ruvi New: “It’s all going to boil down to a few old Jews in Century Village,” he added, referring to a nearby retirement community.
If the Rabbi is correct, then Obama’s plans for direct negotiations with Ahmadinejad may cost him the older Jews in Florida. “The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” says Ms. Weitz, 83.
More importantly, however, is what it may cost the world. We know that Obama is no JFK. And we know that JFK’s failed negotiations with the Soviet Union put the US, and the world, in danger of nuclear war. Dershowitz may be correct about Iran as the first suicide nation. But he may be wrong that they would destroy only Israel.
If Barack Obama wants to follow in Kennedy’s footsteps, he should heed the lesson that Kennedy learned in his first year in office: sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate.
Hillary Clinton has the experience and wisdom that prevents her from promising to negotiate with terrorists or with rogue nations without preconditions. Obama’s bravado and lack of experience could bring our allies into imminent danger.
Kennedy’s greatest triumph–after learning a bitter lesson in Vienna–was the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (LNTBT). It was achieved by the United States first unilaterally ending its own tests and then having the seasoned diplomat and Soviet hand, Averell Harriman, negotiate with the Soviets, an obviously more effective approach than immediate, direct talks at the highest levels. As Kennedy said at American University when announcing the LNTBT:
Let us re-examine our attitude toward the Cold War, remembering that we are not engaged in a debate, seeking to pile up debating points. We are not here distributing blame or pointing the finger of judgment. We must deal with the world as it is, and not as it might have been had history of the last eighteen years been different.
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