http://www.wa****ngtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/15/AR2008051503306_pf.html
Hypocrisy on Hamas
McCain Was for Talking Before He Was Against It
By James P. Rubin
Friday, May 16, 2008; A19
If the recent exchanges between President Bush, Barack Obama and John
McCain on Hamas and terrorism are a preview of the general election, we
are in for an ugly six months. Despite his reputation in the media as a
charming maverick, McCain has shown that he is also happy to use
Nixon-style dirty campaign tactics. By charging recently that Hamas is
rooting for an Obama victory, McCain tried to use guilt by association
to suggest that Obama is weak on national security and won't stand up to
terrorist organizations, or that, as Richard Nixon might have put it,
Obama is soft on Israel.
President Bush picked up this theme yesterday. Without naming Obama
during his speech last night to Israel's Knesset, Bush suggested that
Democrats want to "negotiate with terrorists" while Republicans want to
fight terrorists.
The Obama campaign was right to criticize the president for his remarks
and for engaging in partisan politics while overseas. Many presidents
have said things abroad that could be construed as violating this
unwritten rule of American politics. But it is hard to remember any
president abusing the prestige of his office in as crude a way as Bush
did yesterday. Charging your opponents with appeasement and likening
them to Neville Chamberlain in the Knesset is a brutal blow. It is bad
enough that Republicans use the politics of personal destruction here at
home, but to deploy that kind of political weapon at an occasion as
solemn as an American president addressing the parliament of a friendly
government marks a new low.
McCain, meanwhile, is guilty of hypocrisy. I am a sup****ter of Hillary
Clinton and believe that she was right to say, about McCain's statement
on Hamas, "I don't think that anybody should take that seriously."
Unfortunately, the Republicans know that some people will. That's why
they say such things.
But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who
should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the
Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the
British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the
crucial part of our exchange:
I 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 answered: "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."
For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took
place, that's a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not
unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is
most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican
nominee would reply today.
Given that exchange, the new John McCain might say that Hamas should be
rooting for the old John McCain to win the presidential election. The
old John McCain, it appears, was ready to do business with a Hamas-led
government, while both Clinton and Obama have said that Hamas must
change its policies toward Israel and terrorism before it can have
diplomatic relations with the United States.
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.
The writer, an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of
International Affairs, was an assistant secretary of state and the State
Department's chief spokesman during the Clinton administration.
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