Lieberman Explains Obama

The following is an excerpt from Joe Lieberman's speech at the annual Commentary Fund dinner at New York's University Club this past weekend. You can read the full text here, and his criticism of Obama below. Lieberman's op-ed in today's Journal here. _________________________ "By considering centrism to be collaboration with the enemy-not Bin Laden, but Bush-these activists have successfully pulled the Democratic Party farther to the left than it has been at any point in the last twenty years. Instead of challenging their opinions, far too many Democratic leaders have kowtowed to them. And that, not surprisingly, includes my Senate colleague Barack Obama, who, contrary to his rhetorical invocations of bipartisan change, has not been willing to stand up to his party's left-wing on a single significant issue in this campaign, nor for that matter has he worked with Republicans in the Senate during his three and a half years there to forge the tough, bipartisan compromises that produce results for the American people. In this, Barack Obama stands in stark contrast to John McCain, who has shown the political courage throughout his career to do what he thinks is right - regardless of its popularity in his party or outside it, to take on the status quo in our government when it is not working, and to reach across party lines to get things done for our country. John also understands something else that too many Democrats seem to have become confused about lately-and that is the difference between America's friends and America's enemies. Now, there are of course times when it makes sense to engage in tough diplomacy with hostile governments, times when it is in our interest as well as theirs, and there is some prospect of progress. But what Senator Obama has proposed is not such selective engagement, but a blanket policy of meeting personally as President, without preconditions, in his first year in office, with the leaders of the most vicious, anti-American rogue regimes on the planet. Senator Obama has said that in proposing this, he is following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. But Kennedy never met with Castro, and Reagan never met with Khomeini. And can anyone imagine Presidents Kennedy or Reagan sitting down unconditionally with Ahmadinejad or Chavez? I certainly cannot. If a President ever embraced our worst enemies in this way, he would strengthen them and undermine our most steadfast allies. In some critical regions of the world, Senator Obama already seems to be doing that. In Asia, for example, at the same time Senator Obama has offered to meet without preconditions with the dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, he has turned his back on our democratic ally in South Korea, by announcing his opposition to the trade agreement that is rightly viewed by Seoul as pivotal to the future of our alliance. In the Western Hemisphere, where Senator Obama has said he would be willing to meet without conditions with the anti-American dictators in Cuba and Venezuela, he is simultaneously giving a cold shoulder to the democratically-elected, pro-American government of Colombia. In the Middle East, Senator Obama has famously said that he would meet without preconditions with the president of Iran-the terrorist leader of a terrorist regime, a man whose government is responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq, and who repeatedly promises to destroy Israel and bring "Death to America." At the same time Senator Obama has pledged to meet with the leader of this viciously anti-American totalitarian regime in Tehran, and so many Democrats have struggled to defend his pledge, he and they have simultaneously pledged to abandon the democratically-elected government in Baghdad.

These important questions have, of course, been in the news over the last few days because of Senator Obama's response to the stirring speech President Bush gave to the Israeli Knesset last week. I thought the lessons the President drew from the Second World War were powerfully true for our time, and all times. I assume that Senator Obama and most of the foreign and defense policy leaders of the Democratic Party responded so quickly and emotionally to President Bush's words because they stung them with their relevance to their policies, whether or not that is what the President intended. In his attempt to show how he would bring about "change"-in this case, in our foreign policy-Senator Obama has said he would meet with President Ahmadinejad without preconditions, presumably to work out our differences and to persuade the Iranians to end their attacks on us and our allies. But Senator Obama is not painting on a blank canvass. Such diplomacy has already been tried, thankfully not at the presidential level, and it has failed. The government in Tehran, which Senator Obama says he will talk to, is the same fanatical regime with which our European allies sat and talked for more than two years about their nuclear program-and accomplished nothing. It is the same fanatical regime that recently rebuffed another attempt by the Europeans to sit and talk again about what we might do for them if they stopped their nuclear program, the same fanatical regime whose representatives the U.S. has been meeting with in Baghdad at a lower diplomatic level, in order to confront them with the conclusive evidence we have that they are training and equipping Iraqi extremists who have killed hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis, and demand that they stop. And yet the painful fact is that the Iranian-backed killing of Americans and Iraqis goes on.