Pat Dollard

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Times Online:

Barack Obama today accused President Bush of launching a “false political attack” after he appeared to compare the Democratic presidential hopeful’s foreign policy to appeasement of the Nazis.

Mr Bush triggered a row when he implied during a speech in the Israeli Parliament that Mr Obama’s willingness to talk to radical regimes was a dangerous “delusion”.

Although he did not refer to Mr Obama by name, the Illinois senator condemned the President for using Israel’s 60th birthday to attack Democratic contenders for the White House.

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along,” Mr Bush said.

“We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’

“We have an obligation to call this what it is – the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

Mr Obama has said that as president he would personally negotiate with Iran and offer economic incentives and a chance for peaceful relations if Iranian leaders would forgo their pursuit of nuclear weapons and their support of terrorists.

He has also said he would talk to the Castro regime in Cuba and leaders of North Korea, citing past US diplomatic successes with China and the Soviet Union. The senator insists, however, that he would strongly reject Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, its anti-Semitic rhetoric and terrorist support.

The Obama campaign seized on Mr Bush’s remarks, which came just a day after a widely criticised interview in which the President said Democratic plans to withdraw from Iraq could prompt another terror attack on the United States.

“It is sad that President Bush would use a speech to the Knesset on the 60th anniversary of Israel’s independence to launch a false political attack,” Mr Obama said in a statement.

“George Bush knows that I have never supported engagement with terrorists, and the President’s extraordinary politicisation of foreign policy and the politics of fear do nothing to secure the American people or our stalwart ally Israel.”

The White House denied that the President’s remarks were aimed at Mr Obama, accusing him in turn of thinking “the world revolves” around him.

“It is not (about Mr Obama),” Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, told reporters in Israel.

Today the Obama campaign noted that Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, had told the Washington Post only yesterday that the United States needed to “sit down and talk” with Iran.

Mr Obama has been struggling to dispel perceptions that he has a “Jewish problem” in recent weeks, meeting with the community’s leaders and Israeli representatives to assure them of his commitment to the Jewish State’s security and abhorrence of Islamic extremism.

However he has not been aided by smears alleging that he is secretly a Muslim or a recent report that he is the preferred candidate of extremist Palestinian movement Hamas, repeatedly raised by Republican rival John McCain on the campaign trail.