Blue Spot

Obama Seeks to Clarify His Disputed Comments on Diplomacy - NYTimes.com

While Mr. Obama has said he would depart from the Bush administration policy of refusing to meet with certain nations unless they meet preconditions, he has also said he would reserve the right to choose which leaders he would meet, should he choose to meet with them at all.

The issue presents one of Mr. Obama’s biggest political and policy tests yet as he appears headed toward a general-election contest against Senator John McCain of Arizona: How to continue to add nuance to a policy argument that he views as a winning one, without playing into a fierce round of accusations that he is either shifting positions or appeasing the enemy.

Already the McCain campaign was accusing Mr. Obama of “backtracking,” particularly in the case of whether he would talk with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Mr. McCain, who has almost daily raised Mr. Obama’s stated willingness to meet with the Iranians, hit the theme again Wednesday, asking a crowd in Reno, Nev., “Why is it that Senator Obama wants to sit down with the president of Iran, but hasn’t yet sat down with General Petraeus, the leader of our troops?”

Later, Mr. Obama dismissed the critique, saying: “This is a typical sarcastic comment that doesn’t have anything to do with the substance and is patently untrue, since I just saw General Petraeus when he was testifying in Washington.”

This week, Mr. Obama said that he was still considering meeting with Iranian leaders, though he would not necessarily guarantee a direct meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

“There is no reason why we would necessarily meet with Ahmadinejad before we know that he is actually in power,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “He is not the most powerful person in Iran.”

Last week, Mr. Obama offered a similarly nuanced explanation about meeting with President Raúl Castro of Cuba, saying he would do so only “at a time and place of my choosing.”

The caveats belie the simple answer Mr. Obama gave during a debate last summer, when the issue was first raised in a major public forum. Without hesitation or qualification, Mr. Obama said he would hold direct talks with America’s enemies, drawing strong and immediate criticism from his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

“Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?” asked Stephen Sixta, a video producer who submitted the question for the CNN/YouTube Democratic debate.

Mr. Obama, the first candidate to respond, answered, “I would.”

Several aides immediately thought it was a mistake and sought to dial back his answer. But on a conference call the morning after the debate, Mr. Obama told his advisers that he had meant what he said and thought the answer crystallized how he differed from his rivals.

“I think that it is an example of how stunted our foreign policy debates have become over the last eight years that this is an issue that political opponents try to seize on,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on Wednesday. “It is actually a pretty conventional view of how diplomacy should work traditionally that has fallen into disrepute in Republican circles and in Washington.”

Even after Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called his position naïve, Mr. Obama refused to shy away from it, at times speaking explicitly in terms of a potential meeting with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

But in the last few weeks Mr. McCain and the Republican National Committee have attacked Mr. Obama on his position more fiercely and consistently than his Democratic rivals ever did, with an especially acute focus on Mr. Ahmadinejad, who recently called Israel “a stinking corpse.”

And Mr. Obama and his advisers have responded with more policy details and a more stringent defense. They have, for instance, said that Mr. Obama’s opponents had used his comments that he would be willing to meet with the Iranian leadership — who they do not necessarily define as Mr. Ahmadinejad — to assert incorrectly that he had definite plans to do so.

They have also drawn a distinction between “preconditions” and “preparations” for such talks. In saying he would not impose preconditions on discussions, Mr. Obama said he was referring, for instance, to a Bush administration policy of making high-level meetings contingent upon Iran’s agreement to suspend its uranium enrichment program. Mr. Obama said he viewed its suspension as a goal of any talks, not a starting point for them.

But, he said, he would order lower-level preparatory talks to determine Iran’s motives before agreeing to higher-level meetings.

In the interview Wednesday, Mr. Obama conceded that he might need to do a better job explaining his policy.

Labels: Election 2008, Foreign Policy, Iran, Obama