From the Fact Check Desk: Did Obama Say Iran Is a 'Tiny' Country That 'Doesn't Pose a Serious Threat'?

I think the appropriate challenge to ABC News is to ask them to rewrite the ad copy so it is 'fair and balanced'. Not that campaign ads are supposed to be fair or balanced. Given what Obama DID say and McCain's take on that, as a campaign reply, I don't see anything wrong with it. Certainly no more distorted than Obama's ad's.

I would like to point out that if the US always refused to talk/negotiate with our enemies, John McCain would still be in that POW camp right now.

John McCain actually said that we could stay in Iraq for 100 years and it would be fine with him. January 3rd this year, in a town hall meeting in Derry, NH. That's not "Smear and Fear" the truth. And hearing a potential POTUS candidate say he's perfectly fine with us remaining in Iraq, in a war that is costing us trillions of dollars and the lives of thousands of our troops, while Iraq sits on a surplus of funds, for 100 years doesn't bother you?

When CNBC reports today that the FDIC is consdering that they may have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to help bail out banks, repeating that the Republican candidate thinks the ecomony is fine is not "Smear and Fear", but a valid point.

Seriously, both sides are guilty of using sound bites, but ABC is now targeting this one? Which is not terrible misconstrued. He was clearly stating that Iran is not that serious of a threat. You have to be an idiot to rate the danger of a nation by it's physical size - and I seriously hope that's not what Obama was trying to do. But is is apparent that he is clueless on history. He doesn't even know how we defeated the USSR!! Obama wants to downsize and de-fund our military and get rid of our missile defense systems while a threat like Iran still looms!? That is the opposite of what Reagan did!

The point of Obama's full comment should be obvious:

Russia, as the Soviet Union, was (and still is as the Russian Federation) a significant threat, and we were not afraid to engage in full-out diplomacy with them.

Iran, is not as big a threat as the Soviet Union was. So why don't we use the same tools that we used to work with Russia?

That is the point of his comments. He clearly does think Iran is a threat, and has said as much in other speeches and comments. His point is that we should use all of the tools available to us, not just intimidation and threats.

Well sound like Obama's smear and fear chicken have come home to roost...

I recall Obama claiming that John McCain wants to have a war for 100 years. Smear and Fear...

John McCain says that the economy is ok... Smear and Fear...

The fact is that the big zero compaired Iran with Cuba. The ad is not far off. Much closer than the distortion that NObama uses on McCain.

"He doesn't remember how many houses he ownes any more..." That's a distortion that throws fear and age bigotry into the mix.

Obama got into politics by disqualifying everyone running against him. His technique over and over is to do the same. You can't critizie him because that's racist. Now McCain can't speak of being a POW even though he actually was? It's like saying its not fair to say you went to Harvard when you actually did go there.

I see you don't bother to point out HOW it's not the same thing. McCain got the essence right. About the only thing you could fault him on was Obama saying the threat was relative to the Soviet Union. But Obama is wrong on that too, like everything else. The Russians didn't want to die, Iranians would consider it acceptable.

"And yet, we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying, 'We're going to wipe you off the planet.'
"

When did the Soviets ever say that? I must have been in a coma.

Iran got nuclear power plants going with major help from U.S. Republican administrations.

Dolf Fenster,

Er, no. Again.

What was under "lock and key" and monitoring AFTER the '94 agreement were the Yongbon Reactor and, most importantly, spent fuel rods. The NKs had removed some of these rods and extracted the spent fuel prior to the '93-'94 stand-off. This stand-off was ultimately precipitated by the refusal by NK to allow the IAEA to inspect sites suspected of holding spent fuel illicitly extracted from the Yongban facility. Additionally, the terms of the '94 agreement specifically avoided an accounting of nuclear materials extracted prior to the signing of the agreement, thus allowing the NKs to partially cover their tracks. No extracted fissile materials were ever surrendered by NK.
This is why the IAEA was left with only an estimate of how much the NKs had actually removed and processed. Fissile material under 'lock and key" would have been inventoried and the weight would have been determined down to fractions of a gram thus obviating the need for estimates.

Now, if you want to talk about the 8000 spent rods that were under IAEA monitoring prior to late 2002, that's another issue and not the one that I have been discussing. By this time, NK had already been in possession of several kgs of 239Pu for years and probably had at least a couple of nukes.

If your argument is that Bush diplomacy (or the lack thereof) lead to NK acquiring more nuclear material and weapons than it possessed in 2002, I stand down.

Heywood U. Reedmore wrote:

'What exactly did Obama mean when he said "If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance." If? That clearly implies he believes they are not a serious threat.'

Iran has no nuclear weapons, AND no missiles capable of delivering them as far as Israel, let alone across a big part of the world to the U.S. Those are facts, not opinions.

jock59801 wrote:

'Well, Kruschev famously said "we will bury you." Is that close enough?'

That was a boast in a discussion with Nixon about scientific progress. War was not the subject.

Don't forget, this was the same Khruschev who a few short years later was at first crazy enough to plant missiles in Cuba, but backed down when Kennedy waved the right combination of carrots and sticks.

Something to think about?

Kudos to the below comments:

What exactly did Obama mean when he said "If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance." If? That clearly implies he believes they are not a serious threat.

Posted by: Heywood U. Reedmore | Aug 28, 2008 12:36:00 AM

As usual the Republicans are lying, wow big surprise.... As they have been doing it for 8 years about everything!!!

McCain also said just the other day the economy is in good shape! I rest my case...

End the lying!

Obama/Biden 2008!!!

Oh this aired all right. I saw it tonight during a commercial break, watching the DNC convention. I'm in Virginia.

How can the McCain campaign get away with lying, again and again? Will the 4th estate get the truth out? Is there no honor anymore in the conservative party? I am very, very depressed.

"Which" books have you read...

What exactly did Obama mean when he said "If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance." If? That clearly implies he believes they are not a serious threat.

Jake:

I see you're getting it from both sides, so you must be doing something right. And I often agree with you posts.

But I disagree that it's dishonest to point out that BO has said "Iran is a tiny country that doesn't pose a threat to us". Sure, the USSR could start the war to end all wars. I grew up with that. But rogue-state Iran could kill tens of millions of people once it has access to nuclear weapons. I am not comforted that 10 million is much less than 200 million, which seems to be the only way to make sense of BO's statement.

Are there other formulations of BO's strategic vision that meet the test of veracity? Is it fair to say "Obama belittled the threat from rogue states such as Iran"? I don't see how you could disagree with that. It was in fact the thrust of his comparison, that the Iran threat is "little" or "tiny" in some sense, and therefore less troubling.

In turn, the troubling thing about BO's full quote is that he seems to think that TALKING is how we won the Cold War, as in "Reagan talked to Gorbachev, and Gorby decided the wall had to come down." That worldview is ignorant in monumental proportion. Even Kennedy understood that "tiny" Cuba could pose a MORTAL threat to the US once nuclear missiles were installed. When are you going to complain about the sheer, audacious stupidity of the Obama worldview?

J. Martin Gelinas,

You said:

"When President Bush took office in 2000, NK was - very slowly - building a highly enriched uranium cache. Due to Bush's policy decision to declare NK a member of the "axis of evil" the country responded by leaving the NPT and then building up a plutonium enrichment facility."

Er, no.
The IAEA determined that NK, at the time of the '94 Framework Agreement, already possessed at least 24 kg of weapons-grade plutonium. Using a very conservative estimate of 12 kg per bomb, NK was well on it's way to at least two bombs. In April '97, a DoD spokesman officially stated, "When the U.S.-North Korea nuclear agreement was signed in Geneva in 1994, the U.S. intelligence authorities already believed North Korea had produced plutonium enough for at least one nuclear weapon." By 1998, the US intel community believed that NK had fully resumed the nuclear weapons program that it had renounced in 1994. I forget, who was the POTUS way back then?
In the fall of 2002, NK was publicly called out by the U.S. for violating the 1994 agreement and oil shipments to the NK were halted. NK responded by removing monitoring equipment at the
Yongbon nuclear plant and UN inspectors were removed from NK. By Dec 2002, the IAEA demanded renewed and expanded access to suspected sites. NK responded by rejecting a US call for one-on-one talks and withdrawing from the NPT in Jan of '03.

It is beyond dispute that NK had obtained sufficient quantities of weapons-grade plutonium well before Bush became POTUS in 2001, so your cause and effect calculations are wrong. Best estimates are that they were also in possession (courtesy of the AQ Khan network) of all required nuke weapons components (admittedly of varying reliability and quality) in the late '90's.
My cites are from the BBC and the FAS; where'd you get your bogus info? Seems to read right from Maddy Albright and Wendy Sherman's revisionist history of the events in question.

The context makes it a worse statement, considering what has been going on.

There he acknowledges that Russia would pose a threat.

Too bad he thinks that those days are in the past.

Worse is that he completely ignores the fact that we ARE talking to all these places, that is why we are not at war. The difference is that he wants to concede everything and appease everyone in the hopes that people will like him enough to be nice.