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Obama Suggests Reckless Talks Barry Farber So, if elected president Barack Obama will, in his first year in office, hold unconditional talks with the rulers of Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. Why would America's first black president be in such a hurry to talk to slave masters? Not every liberal idea is whacky. Take medical care. America has too many uninsured people who are too sick to work and too poor to quit. It took me 40 years to quit being enthusiastic about British, Swedish and Canadian "single-payer" medical systems. I can't blame today's liberals for being prisoners of Michael Moore's "Sicko" any more than a butterfly can blame a caterpillar for crawling. There are other issues about which ladies and gentlemen of the right and the left can honorably disagree. But not about willingness to invite tyrants to tea just because they're there and they hate us and, by golly, we're not afraid to talk! Obama says it doesn't show weakness for America to talk to those rogue-state rulers and you're not doing bad folks a favor by talking to them and he's not afraid of losing a PR war to a dictator. That kind of talk brings the student body to raucous applause. It all sounds so honest, open and plausible and makes Bush-Cheney seem like cowards cowering in some sinister bunker afraid of fresh air and daylight. And although Obama proclaims no fear of losing a PR war to a dictator, he in fact loses one before either side says a word.
At the moment I can't think of a liberal notion more egregiously wrong and, in fact, dangerous. When the talking heads on my side begin their argument by warning against "conferring legitimacy" upon unworthy regimes I wince as though my football team just moved six good yards forward but is still shy of a first down. It's quite true, legitimacy would indeed be conferred if the president of the United States were to hold unconditional talks with any of the above regimes or any of half dozen or more other nasty ones that could be named.
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No American president need fear waking up the next morning after talks with the leader of Denmark or Norway or Canada or Japan or any of any other decent democracy and finding a huge hunk of legitimacy missing from his White House wallet. Those countries don't need the legitimacy of being addressed as equals by the leader of the United States. The dictators need it and the dictators who support terror need it even more and those that support terror and pursue nuclear weapons need it most of all.
But there's a much stronger argument against holding unconditional talks with undesirable regimes.
Go back with me to World War II. There were no "talks" among the warring parties from Sept. 1, 1939 when Germany started it by invading Poland until Aug. 15, 1945 when Japan surrendered.
There were no talks, and there was no talk of talks. We declared the doctrine of "unconditional surrender" and every freedom-seeking captive living under enemy control was heartened in the knowledge that he'd never have to see his oppressor shake hands and sit down with leaders of the great alliance he was counting on for liberation. That enabled a mighty force to form and fight inside the captive empires the bad guys thought were safely in their scrapbook. History is guilty of a major oversight in never acknowledging the importance of that force; an oversight it's not too late to correct. Because they knew our side was on their side for keeps and not susceptible to "talks" the underground resistance forces of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece and especially Yugoslavia wreaked holy havoc upon their occupiers in Europe, as did their fellow captives of the Japanese across Asia.
There was no "talk" until the end and there was little talk at the end. German Gen. Jodl was told "Sign here!" on May 8, 1945 and shortly later Gen. Douglas MacArthur told the Japanese representatives where to sign on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. During the cold war, the captive peoples of communist Europe knew they would have to endure talks between Moscow and the west, but their spirits sank as "détente" and "peaceful co-existence" seemed to dominate the day. Nonetheless, their will to be free eventually helped turn the Iron Curtain into a venetian blind. Obviously communism could not have fallen without western might and determination but, don't forget; it was local people who brought down the communist regimes in every single country including the Soviet Union.
They knew all along America and the West had to talk to their oppressors, but they knew America was talking at, not talking up to Moscow. Today freedom has a vast and growing constituency world-wide. There are five hundred percent more democracies today than there were at the end of World War II. American pessimists assume foreigners are doing us some kind of favor when they say, "OK. We want democracy!" That's worse than defeatism. That's criminally naïve. Iran today is seething with unrest. The outsized dominance of youth in the population propels regime-endangering bitterness against the mullahs. Young males want to dance, sing, flirt, hug, kiss, paint their faces at soccer matches and listen to rock and rap on ipods. And masses of women in Iran want to get out of those burkas and into something a little less confining and dull.
They're clenching fists against the almost unbelievable outrage of gas rationing in one of the leading petroleum producing countries on the planet. They don't want an American president willing to talk to their dictators.
They want an American president who will do for them what President Reagan did for communist Europe. And just as non-violently. North Korea may be the worst country in the world today. But Dear leader Kim Jong Il isn't bad enough to extinguish the oxygen of freedom from the nostrils of his subjects. We know that they know they're suffering under an unspeakably terrible tyranny.
They don't want to see photo ops of Kim embracing Obama or any other American president. They want the end of that regime, not any beginning of that regime's "new relationship" with the west.
Cuba is painfully close to many of us; geographically and journalistically. A Cuban joke that died with European communism still makes its point, like the memory of a movie you saw 16 years ago. Before the Soviet collapse the big laugh inside Cuba was, "What's the largest country in the world?" The answer: Cuba! The territory's in the Caribbean, the government's in Moscow. The army's in Africa. And the population's in Miami, Tampa and Jersey City!"
The Cuban people know better than any American conservative the horrible damage Fidel's communism has inflicted on those wonderful people in that beautiful country. Thanks, Obama. Those Cubans don't want to you honor their leader with talks.
They want you to throw your shoulders back if you become president and do all you can to bring about new Cuban leaders, democratically elected, like you.
Dick Morris in NewsMax tells us Hillary Clinton agrees that such talks with tyrants is a bad idea and she loses that argument with the American people, who, at least on that issue, side with Obama 55 percent to 22 percent. Let us pray! In the early 1960s an American black militant arose and challenged the great Bill Buckley to a debate on American civil rights before the student body of the University of Moscow! Buckley dryly replied, "I fail to see the relevance of debating American civil rights before an audience of slaves." I can give you William Buckley's phone number, Obama. I suggest you call him and try to initiate talks.
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