By IPS Correspondents
WASHINGTON, May 16 2008 (IPS)

U.S. President George W. Bush’s comments in Israel Thursday ignited a political campaign row back home as Democratic leaders decried his comparison of engaging enemies to Nazi appeasement.

During a speech before the Knesset – the Israeli parliament – as part of the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state, Bush said, “Some believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before.”

Though the speech made no mention of him by name, it is widely thought to be a repudiation of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama’s proposal to have unconditional talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The “foolish delusion” was a reference to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler with the Munich Agreement that allowed Nazi annexation of part of Czechoslovakia. Bush went on to quote an anti-interventionist U.S. senator from 1939 who thought the war in Europe could be averted if he “could only have talked to Hitler”.

“Appeasement” has become a buzzword for right-wing criticisms of engaging controversial actors across the globe.

The Obama campaign quickly shot back that Bush’s thinly veiled criticisms were inappropriate and showed the short-sightedness of an administration whose policies have done little to either secure Israel or curb the growing regional influence of Iran.

Democratic Sen. Joe Biden had even harsher words for Bush’s attack. Biden reportedly said, “This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset… and make this kind of ridiculous statement.”

He later told reporters in a conference call that he had “reacted viscerally” when approached with the question and admitted that his wording was “not very eloquent”.

Asked about the speech on his campaign bus, presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain said that he agreed with Bush’s comments. Asked about Obama specifically, McCain said, “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 terrorism, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, that wants to wipe Israel off the map, who denies the Holocaust.”

White House spokesperson Dana Perino insisted at a Jerusalem press gaggle that Bush’s comments were not directed at Obama, noting that the president has made the comparison in the past.

“I understand when you’re running for office you sometimes think the world revolves around you – that is not always true and it is not true in this case,” said Perino.

But Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, an Obama supporter, disagreed, calling the White House’s denial “baloney”.

“There is no escaping what the president is doing. It is an attack on Sen. Obama’s position that we should not be avoiding even those we disagree with when it comes to negotiations and diplomacy,” said Durbin, according to the website Politico.

Even Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is still mounting her own uphill battle to seize the nomination from Obama’s clutches, defended her fellow Democrat, saying, “President Bush’s comparison of any Democrat to Nazi appeasers is both offensive and outrageous on the face of it, especially in light of his failures in foreign policy.”

Noting that traditionally “when a U.S. president is overseas, partisan politics stops at the water’s edge,” Democratic Rep. Rahm Emmanuel asked, “Does the president have no shame?”

Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman, a neo-conservative who is supporting McCain’s bid for president, defended Bush, saying in a statement today that the president “got it exactly right”.

“It is critical to our national security that our commander-in-chief is able to distinguish between America’s friends and America’s enemies, and not confuse the two,” he said.

But it was Obama who perhaps proffered his own best defence by citing former Republican presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan’s precedent of negotiating and reaching agreements with then rivals the Soviet Union and China.

Bush’s advocating the continuing diplomatic isolation of Iran runs against comments made by Defence Secretary Robert Gates Wednesday before a group of retired diplomats.

Gates, who served on the bipartisan advisory Iraq Study Group before taking his position at the Pentagon, said that “one area where the Iraq Study Group recommendations have not been followed up is in terms of reaching out the Iranians.”

“We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage with respect to the Iranians and then sit down and talk with them,” said Gates. “If there’s going to be a discussion, then they need something, too. We can’t go to a discussion and be completely the demander with them not feeling that they need anything from us.”

Gates is considered a realist, a centre-right school of foreign policy which asserts that even enemy states can be engaged as state-actors, as opposed to the neo-conservative view that has characterised many of the Bush administration’s policies.

McCain’s top foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, is a neo-conservative.

Obama’s proposal has been roundly criticised by neo-conservatives and their right-wing pro-Israeli allies as appeasement of an Iranian regime that Bush called “the world’s leading sponsor of terror” during his Thursday speech.

The neo-conservatives, most of whom are Jewish, revile Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel rhetoric as tantamount to Nazi anti-Semitism.

They see the concessions made to Hitler in Munich as emboldening him to violate the agreement and invade the rest of Czechoslovakia, eventually leading to the Second World War and the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust.

Informed by that history, neo-conservatives regard the world in the moralistic terms of good and evil – evidenced by Bush’s 2002 declaration of an “Axis of Evil” compromising Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and constant rhetoric about “evildoers”.

Those “evil” forces were not to be negotiated with, as evidenced by administration hard-liners’ out-of-hand dismissal of a 2003 “grand bargain” proposal from Iran to the U.S.

Neo-conservatives and their right-wing Israeli allies oppose many concessions as part of a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal.

Bush mentioned Palestinians once during his lengthy address.

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