Senator Obama quotes President Kennedy time and again: “We should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate,” when describing his willingness to meet with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and others among America’s adversaries and enemies. (Just what Obama thinks he can accomplish with this disciple of the Mahdi who sees himself bathed in divine light, who repeatedly has called for the destruction of Israel, denies that the Holocaust happened, and proclaims that a conspiracy of 2000 Zionists wants to rule the world, is anyone’s guess.)

It is difficult to overstate just how terrible an idea this notion of Obama’s is, from a variety of perspectives, both strategic and tactical; it certainly did not work out for the original JFK. Nathan Thrall and Jesse James Wilkins in the NYT:

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.”

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…

Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was “just a disaster.” Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.” Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.” The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.

Kennedy’s assessment of his own performance was no less severe. Only a few minutes after parting with Khrushchev, Kennedy, a World War II veteran, told James Reston of The New York Times that the summit meeting had been the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy went on: “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”…A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall.

The consequences of the disastrous summit were not limited to the Berlin Wall, a symbol that became synonymous with Soviet enslavement for three decades. Kennedy’s meeting with Nikita Khrushchev “is generally considered to be one of the major factors leading up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962,” possibly the nearest that the world has come to nuclear war.

There is a pattern in Senator Obama’s life that is hard to miss. He has for decades associated himself with, and listened to, family and friends who have bitter grievances against the United States. Perhaps he has regarded listening to such people as in itself salutary or transformational, whether he regards their grievances as legitimate or not. So perhaps he thinks that doing so with Iran and Ahmadinejad would be helpful in some similar way.

Of course one key difference between the former and the latter is that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Iran has been at war with the US (in one way or another and fairly successfully) since 1979. There is a kind of neo Cold War that exists between the two countries. Thus there would appear to be quite a bit of parallelism between a Kennedy-Khrushchev summit and an Obama-Ahmadinejad meeting — and perhaps the same sort of disastrous consequences could ensue.

Senator Obama would appear to have made a rookie mistake in generalizing from his personal experiences. After all, a Reverend Wright might rant and rave, but he was at one point a US Marine; by contrast Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Iran has made a point of killing US Marines for a quarter century. If Senator Obama is to be the next JFK, he should at least try to learn from the mistakes of the original JFK.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 12:49 am and is filed under Democrats, General, War, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.