Dick Morris thinks Obama is wrong on Iran. Yeah, the guy who's been wrong about everything and writes for NewsMax thinks he should be giving Obama foreign policy advice.
If you want to know who Dick Morris is, and why us Obama supporters should never listen to him even when he's criticizing Hillary Clinton, read on. If you want to understand why Obama's Iran policy is going to be more effective at encouraging political reform in Iran than Bush's isolation policy, read on. And if you want to read a good, old-fashioned blogosphere SMACKDOWN of a Media Blowhard Who Really Deserves It - Read on!
cross-posted at Election Inspection
I've been telling people for months that just because Dick Morris relentlessly attacks Hillary Clinton doesn't mean he's any sort of person an Obama supporter should take seriously. Dick Morris made a career out of being a wolf in sheep's clothing, convincing progressive or populist Democrats to adopt more conservative positions to supposedly improve their electability. "Triangulation" was not a concept conceived by Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Mark Penn, James Carville, Paul Begala, or Terry McAuliffe; after Democrats disasterously lost congress in the 1994 elections, Clinton turned to the Dick Morris, who was to the 90's what Karl Rove is to the 00's and Lee Atwater was to the 80's. It was Dick Morris who advised Clinton to distance himself from both Democrats and Republicans and to seek positions that pandered directly to whatever swing voters were momentarily concerned about, whether it was attacking videogame violence or stopping gay marriage, and running our foreign policy through opinion polling. In my estimation, half of everything wrong with the Clinton Adminstration largely involves Clinton's move toward centrism at Dick Morris's urging.
Dick Morris is a creep on an international scale, helping Vicente Fox beat Lopez-Obrador for example, and advising the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a group that even the Conservative Party leader called "fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists" (and the openly racist British National Party has been trying to subvert the UKIP towards official racism for over a decade). He's worked for both Trent Lott and Jesse Helms and numerous other Republicans, and swore off consulting for Democrats in 1988; he even reiterated this claim while secretly working for Clinton in 1995 (ah, but how could he resist working for the President of the United States of America, the Ultimate Client any consultant could have, and making him more conservative to boot). He's a favorite guest of Sean Hannity and Fox news, and for heaven's sake, he's even a regular columnist at NewsMax.com! Someone please tell me how such a ruthless, unrepentant bastard (who tried to impress a prostitute by letting her listen in as he was talking to President Clinton) gets to be taken seriously as the #1 critic of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Did I mention that he's the 7th biggest tax delinquent in America, apparently too high-and-mighty to pay taxes like the rest of us?
In case you still think he has any shed of credibility, this is a guy who thought Hillary was going to be crushed by a Republican in her 2006 Senate re-election bid in New York, a challenge that never really materialized to a Senator who remained extremely popular in her home state. He's been wrong again, and again, and again. Check out this Dick Morris quote:
"Katrina has the capacity to shape the second Bush term in the same way September 11 shaped his first term -- not only in rebuilding New Orleans but in taking preventative steps around the nation to bolster our defenses against natural and man-made disasters and terror strikes. Responding to disasters is a source of presidential strength and popularity, and Bush is about to show how it is done."
Going back to this year's Hawaii caucus, I called out Dick Morris's stupidity when he predicted that Hillary Clinton would win in Hawaii because of her strength with "the Asian vote". The idea that Asians from China, Japan, Korea, the Phillipines, Vietnam, etc, all think and vote alike is a ridiculously ignorant myth and hometown hero Obama won overwhelmingly, just as I predicted. Elliot said it best at Election Inspection just a few days ago: Do not trust Republican strategists.
So today on Rasmussen Dick Morris has a post entitled "Obama: Wrong on Iran" and proceeds to lay out why Obama is wrong and Bush is right on Iran. Generally speaking, if Dubya and Dick Morris agree on something and Obama doesn't, it ought to be pretty obvious who's right and who's wrong when you consider the clownishly humiliating track records of the former two. The first strawman is the difference between "talks" and "negotiations". Obama has never proposed giving any concessions to Iran, and has referred to Iran as "a threat to all of us", stating that military options in dealing with Iran are NOT off the table. What Obama proposes is keeping military action as a last resort, and instead having "direct engagement with Iran similar to the meetings we conducted with the Soviets at the height of the Cold War". Engagement means talks - it means sitting down face-to-face and talking. It does not mean negotiation and it definitely doesn't mean appeasement.
That said, Dick Morris certain opposes the idea of even talking to Ahmadinejad, "based on the fundamental need to topple his regime by increasing the sense the Iranian people have — that he has isolated Iran from the rest of the world, to its severe and ongoing detriment." Regime change, Dick? How's that going in Iraq? And how's our diplomatic isolation of Cuba going? Looks to me like it left one Castro in power for nearly half a century and has transitioned smoothly into another Castro.
Morris's next argument is that the increasing domestic consumption of subsidized oil is going to eliminate Iran's ability to export oil (their prime revenue source) by 2014. Morris may be unaware of the fact that Iran has a uranium mine, a uranium enrichment plant, a nuclear reactor, and a contract with Russia for fuel rods, alongside lots of nuclear scientists trained by the United States from the 1950's through the 1970's. Alternatively, he may be aware of this fact, but quite possibly never considered that Iran would actually use their nuclear program to produce nuclear energy.
The key point of Morris's argument, however, is that diplomatic isolation and economic hardship will lead to "toppling the current regime". Reality check - North Koreans have been starving since 1991 and have on many occassions resorted to eating grass to survive, while they more or less worship Kim Jong-Il as a deity. Of course, Iran is far more democratic and westernized than North Korea; they have internet and satellite TV, and the youth of Iran readily consume western dress and entertainment. Reformist politicians have faced mix success due to the ability of the hard-line theocratic Guardian Council to supercede the Parliament, but Iran does in fact have a democratic parliament, opposition parties, and a constitution that guarantees relgious freedom to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. There are 25,000 Jews in Iran and one Jewish member of the Iranian parliament (Iran's policy towards the Baha'i, however, is repressive and abhorrent). Despite Ahmadinejad's disgusting Holocaust-denial remarks, the number one TV show in Iran dramatizes the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust. Of course the show takes Iran's official position of being anti-Israel without being anti-Jewish; Iranians seem to think Jews were doing just fine with no homeland to protect them (after all, Iran's Jews have been safe for centuries, they reason), which fails to recognize that the Holocaust was simply the climax of a continuous process by which Jews would migrate to an area, settle in, and get slaughtered a century or two later. Obama shares my own view that Israel is our ally and that Iran is a dangerous threat, but that doesn't mean that Iran is entirely fanatical or incapable of common democratic reform.
Ahmadinejad is not going to be "toppled", but he might be voted out. No president of Iran has served more than two 4-year terms, so even if Ahmadinejad wins re-election in 2009, he will likely be gone in 2013. Iran's previous president, Mohammed Khatami, was also its greatest reformer, and reached out to the United States in 2003 with an offer to resolve all outstanding issues (including the establishment of a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine). Bush, of course, refused to meet with him. Khatami, on the other hand, refused to meet with radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr; the parallel here is that Bush views these two men as the same, rejecting negotiation with democratic reformists and militant theocrats alike. Bush's refusal and his suicidally-conducted Iraq War created the conditions necessary for Ahmadinejad's election in 2005.
So I ask you, why should anyone consider Bush's Iran policies effectively now, when they have in fact reversed Iran's long march towards positive reform? The real truth is that radicals like Ahmadinejad are democratically elected in Iran because Iranians are tired of being met by open hositility from the United States. Khatami himself was elected in 1997 party thanks to European Union policies of "constructive engagement" with Iran. Engagement therefore is a proven success and isolation is a proven failure. Furthermore, simply by ending the Iraq War and adopting a less hostile tone, Obama will create an environment that will strengthen the hand of Iran's reformists, who seek more friendly ties to the United States. If Iranians actually want better relations with the US, they'll elect someone in 2009 who can deliver that, rather than Ahmadinejad who is openly hostile to the US.
After promoting a Republican candidate for Missouri Governor, Sarah Steelman, Morris concludes, "We need to let these policies work." Oh really, Dick? You think we should "stay the course"? You think Bush's policies will suddenly become effective we'd only continue letting them fail?
OK, folks, regardless of how you feel about Hillary Clinton, please don't treat Dick Morris as a valid source of anti-Clinton criticism. Morris is a ruthless, corrupt idiot who will say anything that the Republican media machine will pay him for no matter how many times his judgment is revealed to be mind-bogglingly stupid.