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I had really been looking forward to watching the Presidential Debate on Friday September 26, 2008.  I was hoping that one of the candidates would wow me.  I thought Obama did better, but he didn’t knock my socks off.

I was, however,  horrified at John McCain’s inability to correctly pronounce Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s name.  (No wonder he doesn’t want to meet with him).  I may be naive, but not knowing how to pronounce the President of Iran’s name invalidates one’s ability to claim to be an expert on foreign policy.

In case you aren’t sure how to pronounce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad it’s (mah-MOOD) (ah-mah-DIH-nee-zhahd).

It may seem like I am picking on McCain, but as a reference, my 15 year old had to learn how to correctly pronounce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad before a high school debate last December where the topic was whether or not the United States would be justified in pursuing military options against Iran.  Think about it, a fifteen year old had to have the enunciation correct for a weekend competition, but a Senator can’t get it right for a Presidential Debate?

The following is the transcript.

LEHRER: Senator, what about talking?

MCCAIN: Senator Obama twice said in debates he would sit down
with Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Raul Castro without precondition.
Without precondition. Here is Ahmadinenene (ph), Ahmadinejad, who is,
Ahmadinejad, who is now in New York, talking about the extermination
of the State of Israel, of wiping Israel off the map, and we’re going
to sit down, without precondition, across the table, to legitimize and
give a propaganda platform to a person that is espousing the
extermination of the state of Israel, and therefore then giving them
more credence in the world arena and therefore saying, they’ve
probably been doing the right thing, because you will sit down across
the table from them and that will legitimize their illegal behavior.

The point is that throughout history, whether it be Ronald
Reagan, who wouldn’t sit down with Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko
until Gorbachev was ready with glasnost and perestroika.

Or whether it be Nixon’s trip to China, which was preceded by
Henry Kissinger, many times before he went. Look, I’ll sit down with
anybody, but there’s got to be pre-conditions. Those pre-conditions
would apply that we wouldn’t legitimize with a face to face meeting, a
person like Ahmadinejad. Now, Senator Obama said, without
preconditions.

OBAMA: So let’s talk about this. First of all, Ahmadinejad is
not the most powerful person in Iran. So he may not be the right
person to talk to. But I reserve the right, as president of the
United States to meet with anybody at a time and place of my choosing
if I think it’s going to keep America safe.

And I’m glad that Senator McCain brought up the history, the
bipartisan history of us engaging in direct diplomacy.
OBAMA: Senator McCain mentioned Henry Kissinger, who’s one of
his advisers, who, along with five recent secretaries of state, just
said that we should meet with Iran — guess what — without
precondition. This is one of your own advisers.

Now, understand what this means “without preconditions.” It
doesn’t mean that you invite them over for tea one day. What it means
is that we don’t do what we’ve been doing, which is to say, “Until you
agree to do exactly what we say, we won’t have direct contacts with
you.”

There’s a difference between preconditions and preparation. Of
course we’ve got to do preparations, starting with low-level
diplomatic talks, and it may not work, because Iran is a rogue regime.

But I will point out that I was called naive when I suggested
that we need to look at exploring contacts with Iran. And you know
what? President Bush recently sent a senior ambassador, Bill Burns,
to participate in talks with the Europeans around the issue of nuclear
weapons.

Again, it may not work, but if it doesn’t work, then we have
strengthened our ability to form alliances to impose the tough
sanctions that Senator McCain just mentioned.

And when we haven’t done it, as in North Korea — let me just
take one more example — in North Korea, we cut off talks. They’re a
member of the axis of evil. We can’t deal with them.

And you know what happened? They went — they quadrupled their
nuclear capacity. They tested a nuke. They tested missiles. They
pulled out of the nonproliferation agreement. And they sent nuclear
secrets, potentially, to countries like Syria.

When we re-engaged — because, again, the Bush administration
reversed course on this — then we have at least made some progress,
although right now, because of the problems in North Korea, we are
seeing it on shaky ground.

And — and I just — so I just have to make this general point
that the Bush administration, some of Senator McCain’s own advisers
all think this is important, and Senator McCain appears resistant.

He even said the other day that he would not meet potentially
with the prime minister of Spain, because he — you know, he wasn’t
sure whether they were aligned with us. I mean, Spain? Spain is a
NATO ally.

MCCAIN: Of course.

OBAMA: If we can’t meet with our friends, I don’t know how we’re
going to lead the world in terms of dealing with critical issues like
terrorism.

MCCAIN: I’m not going to set the White House visitors schedule
before I’m president of the United States. I don’t even have a seal
yet.

Look, Dr. Kissinger did not say that he would approve of face-to-
face meetings between the president of the United States and the
president — and Ahmadinejad. He did not say that.

OBAMA: Of course not.

MCCAIN: He said that there could be secretary-level and lower
level meetings. I’ve always encouraged them. The Iranians have met
with Ambassador Crocker in Baghdad.

What Senator Obama doesn’t seem to understand that if without
precondition you sit down across the table from someone who has called
Israel a “stinking corpse,” and wants to destroy that country and wipe
it off the map, you legitimize those comments.

This is dangerous. It isn’t just naive; it’s dangerous. And so
we just have a fundamental difference of opinion.

As far as North Korea is concerned, our secretary of state,
Madeleine Albright, went to North Korea. By the way, North Korea,
most repressive and brutal regime probably on Earth. The average
South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean, a
huge gulag.

We don’t know what the status of the dear leader’s health is
today, but we know this, that the North Koreans have broken every
agreement that they’ve entered into.

And we ought to go back to a little bit of Ronald Reagan’s
“trust, but verify,” and certainly not sit down across the table from
– without precondition, as Senator Obama said he did twice, I mean,
it’s just dangerous.

OBAMA: Look, I mean, Senator McCain keeps on using this example
that suddenly the president would just meet with somebody without
doing any preparation, without having low-level talks. Nobody’s been
talking about that, and Senator McCain knows it. This is a
mischaracterization of my position.

When we talk about preconditions — and Henry Kissinger did say
we should have contacts without preconditions — the idea is that we
do not expect to solve every problem before we initiate talks.

And, you know, the Bush administration has come to recognize that
it hasn’t worked, this notion that we are simply silent when it comes
to our enemies. And the notion that we would sit with Ahmadinejad and
not say anything while he’s spewing his nonsense and his vile comments
is ridiculous. Nobody is even talking about that.

MCCAIN: So let me get this right. We sit down with Ahmadinejad,
and he says, “We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,”
and we say, “No, you’re not”? Oh, please.