Obama and the terror war

By MICHAEL HALEY

Barack Obama has come under withering criticism from John McCain and other Republicans for saying that he would talk to Ahmedinajad and other enemies of the United States.

Basically what this is about is the Republicans trying to out macho man the Democrats, a tactic that has worked in recent elections but is starting to wear pretty thin, especially seeing how Bush's manly foray into Iraq has gone.

It is also pretty thin when you realize that many Republicans have said much the same thing at times, you have to talk to your enemies. Even McCain himself has approached that in the past.

James Baker, former Republican Secretary of State, recently said you have to talk to your enemies and that talking to them is not appeasement, it is a way to avoid war. And long lists of other Republicans have said pretty much the same thing, even the current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

The Republicans have tried to say it shows Obama's lack of experience, but I think it shows his lack of experience in political spin more than anything. If he had simply said I think we should talk to Iran if certain preconditions are being met, which he is more or less now trying to add to what he said, their positions would be the nearly the same.

But the fact is that simply saying we need to focus on diplomacy and talking to our enemies instead of all the macho bluster is something Americans want to hear, whether parsed with appropriate qualifiers or not.

Sooner or later you have to talk to people. Even Petraeus has said that the ultimate solution in Iraq is not going to be military, it will be political -- is another way of saying that you have to talk to people.

The Republicans are on a macho trip with this, but if it really only works to go to war, then why not just use nuclear bombs? If it is never going to work to talk to people, we should either leave and stay out of it, or blow the Middle East off the map with nuclear weapons and be done with it.

The problem with both those approaches is that we can't just ignore them because they might attack us, and we can‚' just kill them all either. That leaves talking in one form or another.

In other words, ultimately war does not work. War is not working to solve most problems any more. War has worked in the past, but starting with Vietnam it has worked less and less, and the asymmetrical warfare that the terrorists have started have made conventional military engagement take a quantum leap down in effectiveness.

Obama correctly perceives that the public is ready to face this. He is right that we have to talk to our enemies, but he is on shakier ground when saying that Iran is not a threat to us.

He is arguing that Iran does not equal the Soviet threat, but the problem with that is that things are so different now, and Iran is the mother of worldwide terrorism. So it doesn’t mean all that much to compare them to the Soviet Union. Iran is a major threat, just of a different sort.

What we can really gather from all this is that we see the debate that is shaping up in the General election already, which again is like Obama vs. Hillary in the primaries, the old vs. the new. We need a new way of doing things, the world has changed substantially. Obama is correct in perceiving that the old macho warhorse that the Republicans are using to try to win the election won‚t work and people don‚t want it. He is also correct in reaching for something more diplomatic, finding a new way.

The question is, can Obama deliver? Can he find a way out of our dilemma? That is the key to watch out for in the unfolding election debate.

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