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Rag's and Sailormon-excellent points in my opinion.
Contrary to what passes for accepted wisdom, Obama has made some important distinctions between himself and Senator Clinton. Distinctions that reflect poorly on Senator Obama when examined. For better or worse, Senator Clinton voted on the war during the time it mattered, at the very start. Senator Obama was not only lucky to get elected but, once in the Senate benefitted from the fact that all the heavy lifting had been done previously and it was now quite the easy path to proclaim one's views based on hind-sight. This hardly makes him a geopolitical philosopher of the first order.
Obama's naivete, which accounts for much of his support among populists, has numerous dangerous elements to it. He has been smart enough to shut up about it of recent. Ideas have consequences. And the consequences to Obama's ideas of sitting down with Iranian and Cuban leadership are well known. The last murderous dictator to take advantage of western naivete so successfully was Yasser Arafat. Arafat was given, by virtue of being openly welcomed by western leaders, a prominence and a validity that were contrary not only to the reality of his leadership but were directly contrary, in execution, to western interests. Arafat was marginalized as a force until the Oslo accords and like agreements elevated him to a stature of statesman. Arafat never had a single statesman-like impulse in his miserable existence.
I see, and most with a sense of world affairs see, absolutely no reason to grant even the smallest measure of respectability to either Castro or Ahmadimijhad (sp) by allowing their meeting with a western leader. If there are to be any type of negotiations, those negotiations must start at far lower levels. Once a serious framework has been developed, and success can be reasonably seen as possible, it may be appropriate for high-level meetings. Reagan did not meet with Gorbachev until after many, many lower level meetings had taken place. The results, compared to earlier "summits", were startlingly different.
Senator Clinton knows that this is how things are accomplished in the diplomatic world. Senator Obama on the other hand is merely whistling the can't we just talk this out tune as if we were merely discussing local zoning ordnances among like minded individuals. That's a dangerous level of naivete. And it will be noted that I've not even gone into his interesting notions of Pakistani sovereignty.
One could examine history and make the case that such immature impulses are at the root of the Democratic tradition of getting the US into shooting wars. Perhaps Senator Obama IS the heir to the Kennedy mantle! Like Kennedy, he is a naif.
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