McCain Raps Obama on Iran Policy

by FOXNews.com

Monday, June 2, 2008

John McCain ridiculed Barack Obama’s willingness to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, telling the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee Monday that such a meeting would be a spectacle that would embolden extremists.

McCain often attacks Obama, saying he doesn’t understand that the U.S. should not foster a relationship with a country pursuing nuclear weapons for use against U.S. allies.

“We hear talk of a meeting with the Iranian leadership offered up as if it were some sudden inspiration, a bold new idea that somehow nobody has ever thought of before,”” McCain said, adding that Obama is engaging in a “serious misreading of history.

“It’s hard to see what such a summit with President Ahmadinejad would actually gain, except an earful of anti-Semitic rants, and a worldwide audience for a man who denies one Holocaust and talks before frenzied crowds about starting another,” he added. “Such a spectacle would harm Iranian moderates and dissidents, as the radicals and hardliners strengthen their position and suddenly acquire the appearance of respectability.”

The presumptive Republican nominee proposed a new approach to sanctions, suggesting severely limiting Iranian imports of gasoline, targeted sanctions such as denying visas and freezing assets and calling on the suggesting that the international community divest itself from Iran the way it did in South Africa in an effort to end apartheid.

McCain’s call for sanctions against gasoline imports is a priority that AIPAC’s members plan to lobby for on Capitol Hill later in the week. The U.S. should work toward this goal if the U.N. Security Council fails to issue tougher sanctions, he said.

““Rather than sitting down unconditionally with the Iranian president or supreme leader in the hope that we can talk sense into them, we must create the real-world pressures that will peacefully but decisively change the path they are on,”” McCain said.

The Obama camp countered McCain’s arguments with a pre-buttal that repeated its claim that McCain’s refusal to negotiate would make the U.S. and Israel less secure.

McCain “promises sanctions that the Bush administration has been unable to persuade the Security Council to deliver. He promises a divestment campaign, even though he refused to sign on to Barack Obama’s bipartisan divestment bill, refused to get his colleagues to lift an anonymous hold on the bill, and willfully ignores the fact that trade and investment between Iran and Iraq continue to expand,” said Obama campaign spokesman Hari Sevugan.

“He stubbornly refuses to engage in aggressive diplomacy, ruling it out unconditionally as a tool of American power,” Sevugan continued.

Speaking to the pro-Israel lobby, one of the more influential in Washington, McCain urged financial sanctions on the Central Bank of Iran, which he said aids in terrorism and weapons proliferation, and he took a shot at Obama for his vote last fall against designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, mocking him for not supporting the bill.

““He opposed this resolution because its support for countering Iranian influence in Iraq was, he said, a ‘wrong message not only to the world, but also to the region.’ But here, too, he is mistaken. Holding Iran’s influence in check, and holding a terrorist organization accountable, sends exactly the right message — to Iran, to the region and to the world,,” McCain said to a standing ovation.

The end of the presidential primary season ends Tuesday night with Democratic votes in Montana, Republican votes in New Mexico and votes in both parties in South Dakota. McCain will deliver an election night speech — his first in months — that recognizes the race is moving to the general election. More direct blows between McCain and Obama are expected after the races wrap.

Lee ADDS: What all of this boils down to is a single fact with many repercussions. That fact is, Barak Obama is not someone to trust. His rhetoric is as old as dirt and his calles for change have no method of implementation except for the CHANGING of CONGRESS!