McCain Denies He Was Ever Reasonable On Middle East

posted by John Nichols

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.

Indeed, the McCain campaign has gone so far as to suggest that Hamas is rooting for Obama's election.

For the record, Obama and McCain currently express parallel positions with regard to diplomatic discussions with Hamas. They both say "no." In his more reasonable moments, McCain even says that, "It's very obvious to everyone that Senator Obama shares nothing of the values or goals of Hamas, which is a terrorist organization."

Yet, Republican operatives keep suggesting that Obama is some sort of Trogan Candidate-- theorizing wildly that the Democrat won't be able to restrain himself from engaging in the discussions with Hamas that almost two thirds of Israelis say are needed.

And the McCainiacs are furious with Rubin for suggesting that their candidate might once have had a weakness for diplomacy.

Since Rubin revealed McCain's former sentiments, the email in-boxes of political writers have been filling up with "Jamie Rubin's Lies" messages from the RNC and the McCain camp.

But email spam can't change the fact that McCain was for talking to Hamas before he was against talking to Hamas.

The truth, of course, is that neither McCain nor Obama is offering any indication at this point that they intend to engage in the sort of difficult diplomacy that might possibly -- and that possibility grows slimmer by the day -- foster a renewed Middle East peace process.

The differences between McCain and Obama with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict are unsettling -- not in their breadth but in their narrowness.

But what is truly unsettling is the penchant of the McCain camp to try, solely for the purpose of domestic political positioning, that there is a genuine debate going on about the Middle East in particular or the use of diplomacy in general. As Rubin argues, "Even if McCain had not favored doing business with Hamas two years ago, he had no business smearing Barack Obama. But given his stated position then, it is either the height of hypocrisy or a case of political amnesia for McCain to inject Hamas into the American election.