Christopher Hitchens of Slate weighs in on the squabble during the debate about Henry Kissinger, managing along the way to make a few interesting points.
One non-point I thought was amusing: he referred to Palin as "the thriller from Wasilla".
Anyway, here are the main points.
First, the issue began in the Palin-Couric interview:
[Palin] was reminded that her new friend and adviser Henry Kissinger...endorses direct diplomacy with [Iran and Syria].
"Are you saying," Ms. Couric inquired with complete gravity, "that Henry Kissinger is naive?"
The governor's lame response was to say that: "I've never heard Henry Kissinger say, 'Yeah, I'll meet with these leaders without preconditions being met.' "
This enabled CBS to tack on a post-interview fact-check moment, confirming that Henry Kissinger did indeed favor such talks with such regimes "without preconditions."
Hitchens then refers to a meeting at Georgetown where Kissinger stated very clearly that he was in favor of direct negociations, at a high level, and without making conditions.
This set the stage for the exchange during the debate:
[O]n the same question of "without preconditions," [McCain] walked into Obama's tersely phrased riposte, which was to quote Kissinger in precisely the same way as Couric had already done. McCain looked and perhaps felt a fool at this point.
Hitchens then cites Kissinger's attempt to make McCain feel better by denying what he had just said a few days before.
So that was a nice summary of the issue, but there are two other points Hitchens makes that are worth citing
Kissinger is a terrible source for either McCain or Obama to cite
Obama is making a lot of very bellicose statements.
On this second point, let me quote Hitchens' article again, because I think this is very important:
Does Sen. Obama appreciate, or do his peacenik fans and fundraisers realize, just how much war he is promising them if he is elected? Once again on Sept. 26 in Mississippi—at the end of a week when American and Pakistani forces had engaged in their first actual direct firefight—he repeated his intention of ignoring the Pakistani frontier when it came to hot pursuit of al-Qaida. Out-hawked on this point, as he was nearly out-doved on the Kissinger one, McCain was moderate by comparison. Obama went on to accuse Iran of having built more centrifuges than most people think it has.
Hitchens states that he believe that Obama understands what he is saying, and he makes the comparison between a hawk (a tag he doesn't quite apply to Obama) and a vulture (a tag he does apply to McCain).
Clearly, people living in the countries bashed by Obama understand this. For example, this CS Monitor article, reports that Pakistanis are very upset by Obama's remarks: "[Many are concerned by] Barack Obama’s swashbuckling comments about taking out Al Qaeda leaders on Pakistani soil – with or without Pakistan’s consent. No policy could make him more unpopular in Pakistan". The article goes on to mention that Afghans, on the other hand, are encouraged by Obama's remarks (because they resent terrorists living in and mounting attacks from Pakistan), and also that everyone overseas understands that this is a political election and that neither candidate's remarks during the campaign will necessarily be realized after the election.
I think that it is something we need to be aware of. I believe that Obama will not borrow McCain's budgetary hatchet and start hacking up Pakistan with brute force. On the other hand, I think that Obama has a very high priority of getting us out of our wars, and he sees cleaning up the nests of terrorists in Pakistan as part of the solution.