None of the five with whom Obama said he would meet is in the same league with these monsters of the 20th century.
Kim Jong-il has not launched a war on South Korea or tried to assassinate its prime minister and entire cabinet, as his father, Kim Il-Sung, did. Syria's Bashir al-Assad has yet to fight his first war and has never perpetrated the kind of massacre his father did in Homa. Yet, George H.W. Bush welcomed Hafez al-Assad as a fighting ally in the Gulf War.
Castro is the same evil tyrant he has always been. But Vice President Nixon survived meeting him, and he is surely less dangerous than the young Fidel, who reportedly urged the Soviets to fire their Cuban-based missiles at the United States, rather than pull them out.
Hugo Chavez is an anti-American demagogue, but also the twice-elected president of Venezuela. How does he threaten "The Republic That Never Retreats"? As for Ahmadinejad, he is not the supreme leader of Iran, and his nation has not launched a war since the Revolution of 1979. With no atomic weapons, no ICBMs, no air force to challenge ours, no navy, an economy 2 percent of ours and its oil reserves running out, Iran is scarcely an existential threat to the United States.
All of these rulers wish to be seen as defying the United States, but not one of them -- not North Korea, Iran, Syria, Venezuela or Iran -- can seriously be seeking a major war with the United States that would bring wreckage and ruin to any or all of them.
What we have in common with them is that neither of us wants a hot war. As for a cold war, does any one of these nations represent a long-term strategic or ideological threat to a United States of 300 million, with 30 percent of the world's economy, and the best air force, navy and army on earth, and a nuclear arsenal of thousands of weapons?
If Bush can bring Libya's Muammar Khadafi, who was responsible for Pan Am 103, the Lockerbie massacre of American school kids, in from the cold, why cannot we talk with Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad and Ahmadinejad?
What has any of them done to us compared to what Khadafi did?
Though poorly stated, Barack Obama had a point.