John Nichols: McCain Denies He Was Ever Reasonable On Middle East

[babylonsister]

McCain Denies He Was Ever Reasonable On Middle East
posted by John Nichols on 05/17/2008 @ 09:59am



The Republican National Committee, which has rarely been accused of using a precise truthmeter is accusing Jamie Rubin of lying when he suggests in a Washington Post oped that presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain expressed soft-on-Hamas sentiments in a conversation about the Middle East two years ago.

Rubin served as the State Department's chief spokesman during the Bill Clinton administration, so he too may have some experience bending reality to fit into diplomatic forms.

But it is hard to see how Rubin can be accused of lying when he produces tape of a Sky News interview he did with McCain in which he asks the Arizona senator whether the United States should communicate with Hamas, the radical Palestinian grouping that had recently won elections on the West Bank and the Gaza strip.

Rubin asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain replied: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."

That sounds an awfully lot like Democrat Barack Obama's former view that the United States should engage in diplomacy even with countries and groups it does not agree with -- a position that a history-challenged President Bush equates with appeasement and McCain derides as naive and dangerous.

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http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/321785