WATERTOWN, S.D. — Senator Barack Obama responded sharply on Friday to attacks on his foreign policy, linking President Bush and Senator John McCain as partners in “the failed policies” of the past seven years and criticizing them for “hypocrisy, fear peddling, fear mongering.”
Confronting a major challenge to his world view, Mr. Obama tried to turn the tables on his critics, saying they were guilty of “bluster” and “dishonest, divisive” tactics. He cited a litany of what he called foreign policy blunders by the Bush administration and accused Mr. McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, of “doubling down” on them.
“George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for,” Mr. Obama said at a midday forum here, listing the Iraq war, the strengthening of Iran and groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, Osama bin Laden’s being still at large and stalled diplomacy in other parts of the Middle East among their chief failings.
“If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America,” Mr. Obama said, “that is a debate I am happy to have any time, any place.”
His defiance and disdain for Mr. Bush’s record appeared to be a signal that he will push back against efforts to define him or his record as weak on terror or accommodating to foreign foes, a strategy Republicans used successfully against Senator John Kerry in 2004.
The appearance also signaled that the campaigns are pivoting swiftly toward the general election, with the two sides already in full attack mode.
Consistently throughout his comments about foreign policy, Mr. Obama yoked Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain as one entity, mentioning their names in the same sentence 10 times in barely 10 minutes. He portrayed them as being not only inflexible, but also “naïve and irresponsible,” the characteristics they ascribe to him.
The remarks were made a day after Mr. Bush, addressing the Israeli Parliament, spoke of what he called a tendency toward “appeasement” in some quarters of the West, similar to that shown to the Nazis before the invasion of Poland.
Mr. Bush also said he rejected negotiations with “terrorists and radicals,” implying that Democrats favored such a position. Mr. Obama said he found the remarks offensive.
“After almost eight years, I did not think I could be surprised by anything that George Bush says,” Mr. Obama said, criticizing Mr. Bush for raising an internal issue on foreign soil. “But I was wrong.”
Mr. McCain endorsed Mr. Bush’s remarks, saying, “The president is exactly right,” and adding that Mr. Obama “needs to explain why he is willing to sit down and talk” with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
Mr. Obama at first joked that he wanted to respond to “a little foreign policy dustup yesterday.” But he quickly made it clear that he regarded the exchange as anything but funny, criticizing Mr. Bush and saying Mr. McCain “still hasn’t spelled out one substantial way in which he’d be different from George Bush’s foreign policy.”
“In the Bush-McCain world view, everyone who disagrees with their failed Iran policy is an appeaser,” Mr. Obama said.
Mr. McCain’s campaign answered quickly and sharply on Friday. A spokesman, Tucker Bounds, called the remarks a “hysterical diatribe in response to a speech in which his name wasn’t even mentioned.”
Mr. McCain, speaking to the National Rifle Association in Louisville, Ky., said he welcomed a debate with Mr. Obama over national security and threw the naïve description back at Mr. Obama.
“It would be a wonderful thing if we lived in a world where we don’t have enemies,” Mr. McCain said. “But that is not the world we live in, and until Senator Obama understands that reality, the American people have every reason to doubt whether he has the strength, judgment and determination to keep us safe.”
For nearly a month, Republicans have stepped up attacks on Mr. Obama’s foreign policy perspective, highlighting a Hamas official’s complimentary comments about him in mid-April, as well as Mr. Obama’s statements that he is willing to meet with leaders of so-called rogue states like Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela “without preconditions.” On Friday, Mr. Obama tried, not for the first time, to deflect and counter the criticisms by articulating his view of foreign relations, one in which military might is accompanied by diplomatic engagement with all countries, including enemies. His most specific example was a significantly changed policy toward Iran, one that would be equal parts carrot and stick.
“It’s time to present Iran with a clear choice,” Mr. Obama said. “If it abandons its nuclear program, support for terror and threats to Israel, then Iran can rejoin the community of nations. If not, Iran will face deeper isolation and steeper sanctions.”
The administration’s policy has merely “empowered Iran,” he said, with its unmitigated hostility. As a result, it is now Iran, not Iraq, he added, that “poses the greatest threat to America and Israel in the Middle East in a generation.”
“Our Iran policy is a complete failure,” Mr. Obama said. “And that’s the policy that John McCain is running on.”
Mr. McCain responded by saying: “I have some news for Senator Obama. Talking, not even with soaring rhetoric, in unconditional meetings with the man who calls Israel a ‘stinking corpse’ and arms terrorists who kill Americans will not convince Iran to give up its nuclear program. It is reckless to suggest that unconditional meetings will advance our interests.”
As a setting for a major statement of Mr. Obama’s views on how the United States should deal with some of the most problem-laden areas in the world, the venue here was an unlikely one. Although Mr. Bush issued his criticism from the Israeli Knesset, Mr. Obama stood in what was grandly called a “livestock arena,” with wood chips and even cow chips scattered on the floor.
The Obama campaign said it wanted to move strongly and swiftly, guided by lessons learned from the 2004 campaign.
“There is no question that when the president on foreign soil launches a political attack we need to respond with the facts and with force,” said Bill Burton, national spokesman for the campaign.
Mr. Burton said he expected many such confrontations between Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain. “The truth is that there are many, many real differences,” Mr. Burton said.
In a news conference after the forum, Mr. Obama’s criticisms of his Republican adversaries were even more pointed.
“This White House, now mimicked by Senator McCain,” he said, “replaces strategy and analysis and smart policy with bombast, exaggeration and fear mongering.”
He also said Mr. Bush’s speech on Thursday in Israel “wasn’t about a foreign policy argument — it was about politics.”
To maintain, as the White House and the McCain campaign have done, that Mr. Bush’s remarks about appeasement were not aimed at administration critics like him is “being disingenuous,” Mr. Obama said.
He addressed Republican contentions that he was willing to meet unconditionally with Mr. Ahmadinejad. Mr. McCain has said several times recently that he could not conceive of sitting down and talking with a foreign leader who has called for Israel’s extinction, and he has described Mr. Obama as all too willing to do so.
The criticism is clearly meant to stoke unease that some Jews have expressed over Mr. Obama’s candidacy, a problem Mr. Obama has been trying to address.
Mr. Obama drew a distinction, saying his administration would start negotiations with Iran “without preconditions” and being directly involved himself. For that to occur, he added, Iran would have to meet benchmarks or conditions.
That reiterates remarks he has made numerous times in the past year, though not in a YouTube debate last July that the McCain campaign has repeatedly cited.
Agreeing to begin talks without preconditions “does not mean we would not have preparations,” Mr. Obama said.
“Those preparations would involve starting with low-level diplomatic contacts” like National Security Council or State Department emissaries, he said.
In addition to defending his concept of diplomatic engagement, Mr. Obama said it was Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain who have strayed from what he described as a robust tradition of bilateral support for resolving conflicts through direct negotiations, a tradition that ran from John F. Kennedy to Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
“What’s puzzling is that this in any way would be controversial,” he said. “This has been the history of U.S. diplomacy until very recently.”
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