"Iran, Cuba, Venezuela -- these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. 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.'"
McCain responded by saying that Obama's comments show a lack of foreign policy knowledge and experience needed in a president. Michelle Malkin called Obama the "epitome of a 9/10 Democrat," declaring:
Barack Obama complains that no one wants to talk about the 'issues.' Well, his abject ignorance of warfare in the 21st century is an issue that can't be emphasized enough. And the right side of the blogosphere has been all over it.
So, who's right here? Obama is certainly guilty of downplaying the Iranian threat and has even taken some mild criticism from liberal bloggers. But he's also factually accurate in what should be a fairly obvious statement that the Soviet Union was a vastly larger threat to the United States than Iran, as TPM's Josh Marshall explained:
This point is implicit in much of the current paranoid saber-rattling over the Middle East. But does John McCain really think that the threat posed by Iran is equal to that the United States faced from the Soviet Union -- the world's greatest land military power, with a massive strategic nuclear capacity that carried on a multi-decade ideological struggle with the US?
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