Will George W. Bush and John McCain Condemn Israel?
On a visit to Masada earlier in the day with Prime Minister Olmert, Mr. Bush promised that the fortress, where the Jews lost their homeland more than 2,000 years ago, “shall never fall again.” Later, at the Knesset, he said, “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.
“We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Mr. Bush said. “As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”
Presumed Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, in the same article:
Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, immediately engaged in the debate. “It does bring up an issue that we will be discussing with the American people, and that is: Why does Barack Obama, Senator Obama, want to sit down with a state sponsor of terrorism?” he told reporters on his campaign bus. “I think that Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terror, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, who wants to wipe Israel off the map, denies the Holocaust.”
Israel and Syria have begun indirect peace talks, mediated by Turkey, aimed at reaching a comprehensive peace accord, the three governments announced in a coordinated statement Wednesday. The disclosure was the first public confirmation of the negotiations by all three sides.
The two most senior officials in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office have been leading the Israeli negotiations and were in Istanbul on Wednesday, talking through Turkish mediators to their Syrian counterparts, Mr. Olmert’s office said.
The disclosure of the talks is official confirmation of what was already widely suspected of being ongoing contact between Syria and Israel, directed by Turkey. In the past months, Israel had been reluctant to make the negotiations public. But the negotiations now seem to have made enough progress that all sides decided they should acknowledge the meetings.
The big question now is, will George W. Bush condemn Israel for “believ[ing] that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along”? Will John McCain add that Israel’s prime minister Olmert needs to “explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terror”?
More from the NY Times:
A senior official in Mr. Olmert’s office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the talks with Syria and the decision to make them public had been coordinated and agreed with the United States.
My guess is no. McCain’s Senate office claimed they couldn’t talk about the issue since it was a campaign issue. Mr. McCain’s campaign staff told me they didn’t know the answer to the question and transferred me to the policy desk, where no one answered the phone. I left a message and a number to call. Hopefully I’ll have an update later.
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