Beware the Reductio ad Hitlerum

President Bush's "appeasement" comments really annoy me. The rhetoric itself is bad enough - yes, I know he didn't refer explicitly to Senator Obama, but really, did anyone out there think for a second that he was talking about anyone else?

But what really gets me is how factually wrong Bush is (although I guess I should have gotten used to this a long time ago). Obama is not calling for appeasement, and never has. Let's take the case of Hamas. Obama has explicitly said that he wants Hamas to renounce terrorism and recognize Israel, but, unlike the administration, he has also said that he will not insist that Hamas must comply before any negotiations can begin. This is not appeasement. Appeasement would involve us trying to figure out a way for Hamas to keep doing whatever they want to do, preferably with as few casualties of our own as possible. Appeasement derives from the verb "to appease," which has a connotation of making the other party content/happy/satisfied. Something tells me that Obama's demands aren't going to leave Hamas happy or satisfied. But in order to get anything from them, we have to be willing to compromise, and compromise happens over a negotiating table, not at gunpoint.

Finally, one thing that Bush said in the article linked above really stood out to me as emblematic of why his administration has failed so spectacularly in the Middle East. In straw-manning Obama's motives for calling for negotiations, Bush derisively said that Obama must have the intention of "persuad[ing] them they have been wrong all along." No, Mr. President, that's not the goal. We're not going to persuade them that they're completely wrong, because no one likes to be told that, and all it does is put people on the defensive and make them more hostile to you. You went into Iraq determined to prove that the Iraqis were wrong about everything, and it blew up in your face. Even though these groups may have methods and/or visions for the future that we don't entirely love, they certainly do some things right, and they also have the support of a lot of people on the ground. We're not going to get a surrender out of Hamas, or Ahmadinejad, or any of them, so we have to try for a compromise. And compromises don't happen without respect or without dialogue. Obama is far more invested in both of these than the current administration ever was. This doesn't make him an appeaser; it makes him a realist.