A few months ago, President Bush said that anyone who was willing to meet with Iran was seeking “the false comfort of appeasement.” Well, now the Bush administration has sent its third highest ranking diplomat to Switzerland to have six-way talks with Iran. The talks are intended to get Iran to stop enriching nuclear materials. White House Press Secretary Dana Perino tried to spin away the fact that this shows hypocrisy on Bush’s part:
“We will be there to listen. We are not there to negotiate. And our long-standing principle, that Iran must halt its uranium enrichment before negotiations can take place, remains the same. It’s also been referred to as freeze-to-freeze _ if they were to freeze their enrichment, then we would not move forward with the consequences of not accepting the (incentives) package, which are more sanctions,”
Unfortunately for Mrs. Perino, hypocrisy is harder to spin away than that and most people seem to recognize that Bush now must view himself as equivalent a Nazi appeaser if he is to be intellectually consistent. Of course, his original statement that negotiation automatically equals appeasement is false but unless Bush admits that, he has to see himself as an appeaser.
This also supports the Obama candidacy as he has been calling for strong diplomacy with Iran and this is a first step along that path.
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