Those Appeasers!

Compare and contrast this:

The United States is open to bilateral talks with Iran or Syria at a conference in Baghdad this weekend if either country approaches U.S. officials to discuss stabilizing Iraq, a top State Department official said Thursday.

"If we are approached over orange juice by the Syrians or the Iranians to discuss an Iraq-related issue that is germane to this topic -- stable, secure, peaceful, democratic Iraq -- we are not going to turn and walk away," David Satterfield, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, told reporters.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/03/08/us.iran.iraq/index.html

With this:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history. (Applause.)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/05/20080515-1.html


I guess it wouldn't have been appeasement if the unnamed senator from 70 years ago had been approached by Hitler over orange juice. In the Bush world view, if the bad guys call, we can talk. But the US can't call and talk. Got it.

And, Lord help me, in this speech, Bush refers to "suiciders." Apparently not for the first time."