ABC Publishes Inaccurate Information on Obama over Iran.

Today, ABC incorrectly reported that Barack Obama was flip-flopping on Iran by pointing to his remark that he would only meet with them if such a meeting advanced the interests of the US. But the fact of the matter is that he was not contradicting himself at all -- any such meeting between the President of the US and the President of Iran would require careful preparation and negotiations at the State Department level. Bonds of trust must be built up. But this process would start without preconditions.

There is a big difference between preconditions and preparations -- the former involves no groundwork for a solid relationship whatsoever. And there is another complicating factor -- the Iranian elections will be held in 2009, which means that we will not be certain who we will be dealing with for a while. But Obama would lay out the groundwork to visit with all of our enemies during the course of his administration. Telling other countries that we will not meet with them until they do what we want is arrogance and hubris and simply creates the kind of hostility and mistrust that leads to war.

Obama is not doing anything that administrations of both parties have done over the past 60 years. It is only now that meeting with foreign leaders with whom we have major differences has suddenly become too radical. Ronald Reagan, for all of his blustering against the Soviet Union, still laid out the groundwork to meet with the Soviet leadership when they appointed someone that would be there for a while; when Gorbachev, one of the youngest leaders in Soviet history, was appointed, that was Reagan's chance to hold three summits with the Russians that led to treaties and agreements that reduced the wall of hostility and mistrust. Richard Nixon did the same thing with China. Jimmy Carter engineered the historic Camp David accords that led to peace between Egypt and Israel. You sign treaties and make peace with people who are your enemies, not with people who are already your friends or allies.

Specifically regarding Iran, there are two other complications to consider. The first is that Ahmadinejad may not be in office after 2009 and the Iranian presidential elections; therefore, any deal between Obama and him may be scrapped and they may have to start over. It is a simple fact of business that you have to know who you are talking to and who gets to call all the shots. And Ahmadinejad, while he may be the most visible figure within Iran's leadership, is not necessarily the most powerful, just like the Politburo really ran the Soviet Union even though people like Gorbachev were the face of that government.

Therefore, in order for an Obama peace initiative to work, he would meet not just with Ahmadinejad, but with the clerics who really run the country. That way, he could gauge their true intentions and convey to them the message of the world that their funding of Hezbollah has to stop and that there must be a verifiable nuclear arms deal that would allow Iran to have peaceful nuclear energy and that would ensure that it would not fall into the wrong hands. Once the levels of trust are built, the US would begin easing the sanctions against Iran and allow them to become once more a member of the family of nations.

This is a position that has bipartisan support. Obama is simply expressing the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group as well as articulating the policies of the administrations of the last 60 years before Bush II came on the scene. The same concept applies to Syria and other enemies -- in order to get what we want, we must be willing to sit down and talk to them and find out what they want.

What we can't do is to invite, say, Chavez over to the White House, pop a beer, and start talking. That is simply a way of sweeping problems under the rug. Both countries have interests that have to be represented and that have to be pushed. And in order to start with that, it starts at the lower levels of the diplomatic chain and then works its way upward. There were, for instance, a ton of lower-level talks between the Americans and the Russians, then meetings between our Secretary of State and their Foreign Minister before Reagan and Gorbachev finally met for the first time in 1985.

What ABC News is doing is insulting the intelligence of their audience and playing into the Bush administration's dumbing down of our electorate. This is the same sort of thing that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Change starts at the ground level; what we must do is to turn off the boob tube and turn on alternative media which is out there discussing real news and real solutions to our problem. The media lied to us about Iraq; therefore, why should we trust them when they accuse Obama of flip-flopping? Why should we hire someone as Vice-President of the company when they have already shown that they are not trustworthy? There is a reason why Olberman's ratings are skyrocketing and why the rest of the print and TV media is dropping -- he has shown himself to be trustworthy. Many other media people are too busy substituting their own personal agendas for what really matters. Judith Miller is alive and well.