The McCain Attack Machine

Now, let me get this straight. Barack Obama contends that Iran, Cuba and Venezuela pose nothing like the threat that the Soviet Union did for over 40 years and McCain attacks? He pounces on the following statement:

“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.’ ”

Hmm, so McCain says that Obama says that Iran was a “tiny threat.” Here is McCain’s exact quote: “The threat the government of Iran poses is anything but tiny.”

So, first of all, Obama never said the threat was “tiny”; in fact, he has been clear that Iran poses a very significant threat.

Second, his point is that we need to talk with our adversaries as well as our allies.

Third, for anyone who lived through the Cold War, feared every day a nuclear annihilation of the planet, a nuclear holocaust, and engaged in drills at school, the building of fallout shelters, Iran is certainly not the threat that was the old Soviet Union.

And every president from Roosevelt to Reagan to Bush talked to our adversaries — to the Soviets, to the Chinese, to nations large and small.

So, please, John McCain, you and George Bush got us into this mess in Iraq and Iran — using precisely the neocon rhetoric you are continuing to push. The key question is how do we stabilize the Middle East, defeat al Qaeda and put this disaster of an Iraq war behind us as quickly as possible?

McCain doesn’t seem to have the answer — other than more escalation and expansion of the war, the war in Iraq and the war against Obama. And heaven forbid we should try and negotiate with other nations! Nations like the Soviet Union, China or Libya, for example. Wouldn’t that be horrible.