The Redhunter

Writing in National Review, McCarthy nails Rice and good:

We were dealing with an apocalyptic regime certain that radical Islam's global triumph was as imminent as the long lost Mahdi's arrival any day now. President Bush had said time and again that it was pointless to negotiate with terrorists because they are -- surprise! -- incorrigible. Yet, Secretary Rice convinced the president that the ball would really be advanced by [drum-roll] . . . direct U.S. negotiations with Iran.

Flash forward to 2008. The Democrats' presumptive (and increasingly less-compelling) nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, has rightly been ridiculed for his offer to meet, without preconditions, with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His stated policy is so patently idiotic that Obama, on the cusp of the brass ring, has been reduced to lying about whether he actually stated it (he did, repeatedly), and to dissembling about whether preconditions are the same thing as preparations he now purports to have envisioned all along.
...

Back to spring 2006. Iran was being particularly obstreperous about its nuclear-technology development. The State Department proposed direct negotiations -- i.e., face-to-face meetings between the president's emissaries and Ahmadinejad's subordinates.

What was the price? What stringent preconditions did Condi Rice persuade the president that we should demand?

A commitment to foreswear, or at least suspend, the development of nuclear weapons?

A commitment to refrain from abetting Iraqi insurgents in the murder of American troops?

A commitment to stop funding Hezbollah, the world's most adept terrorist organization -- and the one that, prior to 9/11, had trained al-Qaeda operatives and killed more Americans than any other?

A commitment to restrain its Revolutionary Guards and Qods force from targeting Americans?

A commitment to retract its threats to wipe Israel from the face of the earth?

Well . . . not exactly.

In the midst of the war on terror, at a time when the express policy of the United States was to regard and treat as terrorists the regimes that sponsor terrorism, in circumstances where Iran was actively coddling al-Qaeda and killing American soldiers, the Bush administration insisted on . . . no preconditions for negotiating with Iran.

Sure, Bush (unlike Obama) did not offer a personal sitdown with Ahmadinejad. But does that really matter? Top-level meeting or no meeting, what happened was a disgrace.

Ouch.