General Discussion

alp227

(32,006 posts) Sun Jun 1, 2014, 10:12 PM Jun 2014

Anyone remember when BUSH negotiated with terrorists?

Send these links to your teabag friends who complain about "OBAMA NEGOTIATED WITH TERRORISTS". Here's an actual Facebook status from an old friend from high school:

Just for Obamma trying to Make a Deal with Terrorist He should be Impeached. We Do Not Negotiate with Terrorist. He is hands down the dumbest and Most Non American president we've had. I'm ashamed.

In today's era of new media-induced short-term memory, via this old DU post, I found some golden oldies.

Reuters, 2/20/05:

U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers are conducting secret talks with Iraq's Sunni insurgents on ways to end fighting there, Time magazine reported yesterday, citing Pentagon and other sources.

The Bush administration has said it would not negotiate with Iraqi fighters and there is no authorized dialogue, but the United States is having "back-channel" communications with certain insurgents, unidentified Washington and Iraqi sources told the magazine.

Or the Guardian, on 6/10/05:

American diplomats and army commanders have held indirect talks with insurgents in Iraq, the first officially sanctioned contact between the two sides in two years of violence.

A US embassy official in Baghdad said efforts were under way to "engage" elements of the resistance in an apparent softening of the Bush administration's opposition to negotiations.

Or The NY Times, 1/7/06:

American officials are talking with local Iraqi insurgent leaders to exploit a rift that has opened between homegrown insurgents and radical groups like Al Qaeda, and to draw the local leaders into the political process, according to a Western diplomat, an Iraqi political leader and an Iraqi insurgent leader.

And if anyone asks "why don't you post this on your friend's Facebook?" I've decided it's much better to leave my friend with zero notifications so that friend ends up shouting at a wall. And before you call him an "armchair warrior", he did serve in the Marines after high school...but I guess exposure to right wing propaganda and stuff turns you into one!