The Iranian threat is tiny compared to the USSR

May 19, 2008

Over the weekend, responding to criticisms from Bush and McCain, Barack Obama explained his perspective on diplomacy.

For those of you who can’t watch clips online, Obama explained, “Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean, think about it: 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.’ And ultimately, that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall.”

This strikes me as the kind of sentiment that’s hard to disagree with, but John McCain spoke in Chicago this morning, and went after Obama for saying the potential threat posed by Iran is “tiny” compared to the USSR during the Cold War.

McCain said, “Obviously, Iran isn’t a superpower and doesn’t possess the military power the Soviet Union had. But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant.” McCain went on to argue that Iran is playing a destructive role in Iraq and is “intent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” McCain concluded, “They might not be a superpower, but the threat the government of Iran poses is anything but ‘tiny.'”

Does McCain really want to debate this?

First, Obama didn’t say the possible Iranian threat is “tiny.” He said it’s “tiny” when compared to the Soviet Union. As Josh Marshall explained, Russia was, after all, “the world’s greatest land military power, with a massive strategic nuclear capacity that carried on a multi-decade ideological struggle” with the United States. McCain thinks it reflects poor “judgment” to recognize the obvious difference between a nuclear superpower and Iran?

Second, there’s a bit of a contradiction here. Over the weekend, the McCain campaign said Obama was giving Iran too much credit, offering Iran “the status of a super power akin to the Soviets.” Today, the McCain campaign said Obama isn’t giving Iran enough credit. These guys should probably coordinate talking points among themselves before going on the attack.

And finally, on the substance, Obama is so obviously right about Iran it’s hard to believe this discussion is actually happening. As Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria explained a few months ago: “Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century…. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?”

Ultimately, McCain seems to believe diplomacy just isn’t worth it. We could engage Iranians directly, but Iran might, as a result, get stronger, and our discussions may not stem the country’s ambitions.

Here’s the thing: thanks to the war in Iraq that McCain is so fond of, Iran is already getting stronger and more ambitious. So why keep pursuing an approach that isn’t producing the results we want?

We live on a planet of pussy Republicans

  • I feel vindicated, as I’ve been advocating a definite strategy of calling McCain fearful. Let’s keep asking: What is he afraid of? Should America be governed by people who decide through fear?

  • Let’s see.
    Soviets could make their own weapons and delivery systems.
    Iran can make a tank or ten and have no means to make the sophisticated systems required for a nuclear or military power.

    Soviets had a huge industrial base to draw on.
    Iran’s primary and only real export is oil and no powerful industrial base.

    Soviets had a blue water navy and the means to project military power
    Iran has some old ships from the Shah and no means to project power outside the ME.

    Iran is a region threat. Period.

  • Grandpa Simpson is a fearful old man. I don’t know why John McCain is so afraid. He is afterall incredibly rich. His wife has $100,000,000.00. He is not in danger of getting his house foreclosed. He is not going to lose his healthcare for the rest of his life. He is super rich and comfortable and has a great job that will pay him lot’s of money for the rest of his life. Why is he so afraid? Did the people that tortured him cause him to be mentally ill? He is trying to turn us into a bunch of pussies, just like Bush and Cheney did during the first 2 terms. Should we elect Grandpa Simpson to Bush’s 3rd term? What kind of a moron does he think I am?

  • What McCain wants is to “win” wars.

    Wonderful side benefits would include getting control over all that lovely oil that the short-sighted Republicans have held us addicted to rather than listen to those silly Dems and their calls for alternate energy sources. And, best of all, all those (Republican!) military contractors that charge taxpayers thousands of dollars for each toilet and screwdriver can continue to reap the rewards from war followed by endless occupation.

    He can’t come out & say that stuff, so he falls back on fear-mongering.

  • OT Hillary is on CNN right now in KY. She looks like she’s 80 yrs old. Did she fire her makeup crew?

  • “Does McCain really want to debate this?”

    As opposed to anything else, you bet.

    The fact that he is wrong and can be shown to observant Americans to be wrong doesn’t change the fact that this is the best he has to offer, fear.

  • I wouldn’t say Iran is a threat on the same level as Cuba and Venezuela. Iran may not be a nuclear power able to attack the US, but it is a serious threat to Israel and is feared by other Middle Eastern countries (who counted on Iraq to balance it) and has the capacity to further destabilize the region and disrupt oil supply (and raise oil prices further), which weakens our economy. That makes it NOT comparable to the other countries in his list. I also see little value to pissing off Venezuela by implying it is unimportant, when it is a source of alternative oil. Is this a sample of Obama’s diplomacy?

  • If Hillary cannot look like a babe 24/7 then she is clearly not fit to be president.

  • Danp @ #7:
    Barack has aged a bit this year as well. I think this is a natural consequence of spending so much time campaigning; after a while, any time NOT spent campaigning starts to feel like you are giving your opponent an opening. So much for sleep, relaxation, etc. The most extreme example I remember seeing was actually Bill Clinton in 1992. He was a young man when the campaign season started but by the end he had giant bags under his eyes, gray in his hair, and his voice had gotten raspy (or at least more raspy than at the start).

  • Dan – Agreed. The only distinction I would make is that Hillary is usually very sharp looking. Today’s look was a bit of a shock. And I apologize to Mary if I was too irreverant.

  • oh, mary, mary, mary. just when i think it’s not possible for you to come up with more foolishness, you demonstrate that you can. sometimes i wonder if you really read the posts, or just the titles.

  • The problem McCain has here is that he doesn’t want to talk to Iran because he wants to start a war with them. However starting another war in the Middle East probably ranks well below staying in our current one for another 100 years… so he’s sort of in a pickle… admit to being a crazy neocon or get accused of being afraid of talking to our weak enemies.

  • When you see things in black and white, there is only us/them, good/evil, threat/no-threat. It’s a shame that the world is so complicated that an entire political party can’t cope with it.

  • Actually Mary in #9 was beginning to convince me that there might be life after Hillary for even the most OCD of the Clintoninstas – but then she turned it into another barb against the covert Muslim antichrist who’s gonna force her to vote for McCain. And I understand her kneejerk reaction in #10 to DanP at #7, even though I think DanP was actually expressing human concern for another human.

    In another thread someone started a list of academic buzzwords that should be retired from serious discussion – this one isn’t academic, but I’m getting REALLY tired of it – pussies. How is this offensive? I can’t even begin to count the ways – but it’s beyond typical sexism – or maybe it’s one of those things that ‘everyone’ says so often that no one can see how it lies at the very foundation of sexism. What’s wrong with ‘chickenshits’?

  • Does McCain really want to debate this? YES. And I say, let’s bring the debate to the forefront. I have seen McCain in debates and he is a whining, wheedling, talking points repeating, pipsqueak when it comes to debate. Obama is thoughtful and articulate, and has the facts on his side and at his fingertips.
    Bring it on.

  • I also see little value to pissing off Venezuela by implying it is unimportant, when it is a source of alternative oil. Is this a sample of Obama’s diplomacy? -Mary

    To answer your question, I hope so.

    Venezuela is not an alternative source of oil. It’s the fourth largest importer of oil to the United States behind Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. Nigeria, Angola, Iraq, Algeria, the UK, and Brazil round out the top ten. So I (and the facts) disagree with your assessment that Iran has the ability to disrupt oil supply, unless you’re telling us they plan to attack Canada.

    And please, tell me how it’s insulting to Venezuela to be told they aren’t a threat like the Soviet Union and are worth sitting down with and having open, honest discussions? Seems more like Obama is offering them a seat at the table to me, and I don’t see how that is ‘implying they are unimportant,’ but I don’t look at the world through a haze of hatred for Obama.

  • Can this deliberate misquoting by McCain be played as accidental?

    A symptom of a man either hard of hearing or incapable of grasping simple sentences in their entirety?

    It’s Thanksgiving, and ol’ Uncle John is only catching every fifth word again.
    Sure, you have to have him over for dinner, (you love the big lug!) but would you make him your president?

  • JW Hammer nailed it. “The problem McCain has here is that he doesn’t want to talk to Iran because he wants to start a war with them. ”

    McCain’s advisors have all said that they want us to attack Iran. Why doesn’t that come up in the discussions? Does McCain agree with his insane policy advisors or not?

  • It’s probably a bad tactical error on McCain’s part to actually debate the nature of the threat. Once you move away from their ill-defined boogeyman to discussing whether or not Islamic brown people actually do have the evil superpowers they’ve implied all these years, it’s fighting about reality. The GOP’s turf is fear and fiction; they don’t do so well with reality.

  • McCainiac talks to Das Base. Das Base isn’t interested in facts, it just wants to hear someone talk tough. McCainiac could stand before Das Base and chant “Democrats, bad! Foreigners, bad!” for an hour and they’d lap it up.

    Obama talks to anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together. The type of person who can remember what was said two seconds ago and is suspicious of people who don’t have their facts straight (or at least bother to lie consistently).

    The contrast makes for great political theatre, which of course means ReThugs looking particularly stoopid.

  • Ultimately, McCain seems to believe diplomacy just isn’t worth it.

    When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

  • Bernard HP Gilroy @ #2 said:

    “I feel vindicated, as I’ve been advocating a definite strategy of calling McCain fearful. Let’s keep asking: What is he afraid of? Should America be governed by people who decide through fear?”

    Bernard, you’ve touched on something important. The people who have been (mis)leading the United States ARE fearful people. They’re paranoid control freaks. And they feel and magnify the fear of their supporters.

    Fighting terrorism requires the courage to live our everyday lives while we retain our American values and rights. These clowns have jumped into their hidey-holes in “undisclosed locations” while throwing out everything that America stands for. (Torture? No problem. We’re fighting TERRORISTS!)

    What is McCain afraid of? The same thing that has petrified the entire Bush Administration for the past seven years. THE TERRORISTS ARE COMING! You could see the fear on Bush’s face in the tapes from the reading of “My Pet Duck.”

    Are Americans brave people or fearful ones? In my state, I’m afraid that fear dominates. We’re afraid of terrorists, afraid of foreigners, afraid of gays, afraid of Muslims, afraid of blacks, afraid that someone is coming to take our guns away. It’s raw, naked fear. I see it every day.

    So maybe it’s true that McCain is fearful, but my sense is that it’s not such a good campaign theme. Many Americans share his fear. Perhaps a majority.

  • Senator Obama will expose them (Republicans) as Wizards (as in Oz –illusionary figures masquerading behind a curtain of Deceit!) The Republican Magicians are skilled in rituals of smoke & mirrors. We, the American people, are tired of their trickery’s based on illusions and not fact, and like the Wizard of Oz, when the curtain is pulled back by “the light of truth”, they will be exposed as fakers and con-artists, with loud, scary voices with no Real Power, pulling strings of “make believe” to coverup their weakness. This unveiling will enable us to get off this merry-go-round — “yellow-brick-road” of illusion and deceit.

    This massed negativity has been a real detriment to American economic progress and peace in Iraq. Such people are like a millstone around the neck of humanity, crippling true effort, murmuring Family Values, yet do nothing but impede true progress while humanity is dying. This massed, organized negativity has been what has enabled them to work so ruthlessly with power and success at the destruction of all that has attempted to get in the way of their projects and desires. They refuse to recognize that humanity can solve its problems without aggression and force and instead use the energy of goodwill, sharing and cooperation.

    If you disagree with their policies, they cry out in unison: I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down in hopes of inciting fear and getting the opposing party to back down! Only this time, we will not be fooled again by these “fakers and con-artists” and our House will withstand the onslaught of this False, Fleeting Wind that has devastated the American way of life, no more!

  • My Friends,

    The Viet Cong secretly cloned me and then replaced the Real John McCain with the doppleganger in 2007…
    I will come back to “Deal with” this infiltrator once my wife sends her jet to pick me up.

    -John McCain, room, 205, the New Hanoi Hilton…..

  • McCain needs his war with Iran; if only to camouflage the truly decrepit conditions in the overall Republican policies of governance. Viet Nam became a smokescreen for the domestic strife in the US (it crippled LBJ politically and damaged Nixon’s domestic-policy credibility—remember “wage-price freeze?”), as did the first Iraq War (Bush41 was a lousy domestic policy president, and once the Gulf War was over, it became horrifically clear).

    He also needs a war with some serious profit potential in it. How much oil is there in Afghanistan? How much natural gas? What of globally-profitable value is there, besides the opium poppies?

    Now, look at Iran—heavy oil reserves, unrestricted access to the Caspian Sea, both the Persian and Oman Gulfs, Iran’s entire eastern frontier, Afghanistan’s entire western frontier (not to mention Pakistan’s)—the fact that it exists, and that it doesn’t belong to McCain and his ilk, is a threat to the megalomanic schizophrenia that defines John McCain.

  • So why keep pursuing an approach that isn’t producing the results we want? — CB

    Throwing good money after bad is typical behaviour of all dedicated gamblers. McCaint isn’t any different, down to and including all of his superstitions (lucky pennies etc); for him, there’s always the hope that, next time around, the results will be different.

    So yes, he’s a fearful, wimpy gramps. But he’s also a fool and has, probably, always been. Hopefully, we won’t have to watch him cowering in the White House for the next 4 yrs.

  • Mary said:
    I wouldn’t say Iran is a threat on the same level as Cuba and Venezuela. Iran may not be a nuclear power able to attack the US, but it is a serious threat to Israel and is feared by other Middle Eastern countries (who counted on Iraq to balance it) and has the capacity to further destabilize the region and disrupt oil supply (and raise oil prices further), which weakens our economy.

    Iran is a divided country. President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is in a bitter struggle for power with the Mullahs. Most of the county’s young people are angry that after 30 years the Revolution still has not made their lives better. But every time the United States rattles it’s sabers, everyone in Iran rallies together. If we’d just shut up and give them an occasional covert nudge, the theocracy would probably be overthrown.

    As far as Iran being a threat to Israel, Iran is not a nuclear power but Israel is. No one knows for sure, but the best estimate I’ve seen is that Israel has about 60 nuclear weapons. If Iran actually tried to wipe Israel off the map, the 3000 year history of Persia would come to an abrupt end — and Iran’s leaders know it.

  • We live in a fearful culture. Every TV commercial has imbedded in it somewhere an element of fear. Hollyweird reinforces it at every turn. We have been conditioned to be fearful for over half a century, and it has taken hold. Total security is what this country wants from whatever boogey man or thing is out there, real or contrived. The Rethugs have elevated fear to a sacrament, and they administer it with both baseball bats and finese. McSame is just doing what comes naturally: stoking fear. Until the American Sheeple grow a brain, and I’m not holding my breath, fear is the most powerful political force in the country. The politics of hope does resonate with some, but will continue to suck hind teat for the indefinite future.

  • Iran has been funding Hezbollah, which is why it is on the terrorist sponsor list. Iran has made statements explicitly threatening the existence of Israel. They don’t have to be a nuclear power to be a threat — they have conventional missiles capable of attacking Israel. Israel does have nuclear military weapons, but no one wants them to have to use them.

    Iran can interfere with our oil supply by further destabilizing the Middle East. Saudi Arabia is concerned about Iran, as are the other Arab countries, and Saudi Arabia is one of our suppliers. Iran can interfere with our oil supply by messing with Iraq. It can interfere with our oil prices just by acting up and giving the impression that the Middle East is in turmoil, something that drives up oil prices whenever there is a new perceived crisis. Yes, we already import oil from Venezuela, just as we also have our own sources of oil, but an alternative means we could change the proportions we get from them, as we must if our usual supply is not available. Do you imagine Bush wants to be more dependent on Chavez? Do you imagine Chavez thinks of Venezuela as similar to Cuba? It is much larger, more economically viable, and has better prospects and an entirely different history. I doubt he would consider the comparison flattering.

    Our own country is an example of how a leader with views unrepresentative of the people can drag them into a stupid war and otherwise destroy the relationships between that country and other nations. It doesn’t matter that Iran is divided when there is not much chance for the internal opposition to exert influence on its leader. If you are waiting for someone to rise up and overthrow Ahmadinejad, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

  • This entire argument is silly. Representatives of the Bush administration have met with representatives from Iran before, and have made open requests to do so again. This is nothing more than arguing over semantics because McCain doesn’t wish to see The POTUS meet face to face with Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions being met first (not to mention the fact that Ahmadinejad isn’t the true leader of Iran), which is also what Obama’s foreign policy advisor Susan Rice has said Obama believes in. So, really, this all much ado about nothing. It’s both sides making political hay to rev up their bases and points to the US having more business as usual come next Jan. 20.

    The other question I have is why do Obama supporters so readily agree with his sketchy view of history? Reagan may have talked to Gorby face-to-face but this was on the heels of decades of wars between eastern and western bloc countries, and Reagan himself had attacked Grenada two years before meeting Gorby, and on a seperate front sent missles into Libya. Obama trying to paint Reagan as a talker only and McCain as a no-talking-at-all (when he has been very involved in “strong diplomacy” within the Middle East for years) is inaccurate. Gorbachev had been meeting “preconditions” that showed he was willing to listen to reason. Iran has made no such effort, which is all that McCain (and Obama) expect from them. This idea that McCain and Bush have no interest in ever talking to Iran is flat-out false.

  • Solo Juve.
    What?
    No, seriously, WHAT?
    Selective memory ain’t a virtue.

    j

  • decades of wars between eastern and western bloc countries

    What kind of unprocessed horse manure have you been smoking, child? Had there been any actual “hot war” between either the PRC or the USSR and the US, you’d be living in a glow-in-the-dark mud-hut, dining on strontium-soaked grass, and watching fluorescent sunsets through your wildly-deformed, cycloptic eye.

  • I hear John McCain has announced a new foreign policy. He will never, ever talk to tyrants or despots . . . but he sure will hire their lobbyists to run his campaign.

  • I’m beginning to think that the Republican disdain for talking with our “enemies” is born out of laziness. It’s actual *work* to meet and talk with people. And coming on the heels of our current Vacationer-in-Chief, what Republican wants to do any actual work?

  • “Over the weekend, the McCain campaign said Obama was giving Iran too much credit, offering Iran “the status of a super power akin to the Soviets.” Today, the McCain campaign said Obama isn’t giving Iran enough credit.”

    Exactly, this is the point that struck me most – so what is McCain saying, that he’s Goldilocks and he thinks Iran is just the right size of threat?

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