Barack Carter Obama

Mideast: He views Iran's nuclear threat as "tiny." He'd meet with its leader, who is pledged to Israel's destruction. His adviser wants Israel to disarm. Clearly, Barack Obama is running for Jimmy Carter's second term.

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If we've been particularly hard on Sen. Obama in recent days, it's because he's a gift that keeps on giving. He consistently demonstrates his lack of qualifications to be commander in chief based on experience, worldview and judgment.

His latest foray into dangerous naivete came while campaigning Sunday in Pendleton, Ore. He told the assembled multitude: "Iran? Cuba? Venezuela? — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us."

He went on to defend his policy of "aggressive personal diplomacy" and called for "tough, disciplined and direct diplomacy. That's what Kennedy did. That'd what Reagan did."

Well, not quite.

Kennedy in his inaugural address pledged that "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty." That doesn't sound like Obama's policy on Iraq or anywhere else.

Yes, Kennedy talked to Khrushchev. But the Soviet leader came away from that summit so unimpressed with the young and untested American president that the following year he put nuclear missiles in Cuba targeted on American cities. Kennedy was forced to blockade Cuba and risk nuclear war.

We can't risk that with Iran. As John McCain points out, Iran, unlike the Soviet Union, is directly and daily involved in the killing of Americans through training of Iraqi insurgents and arming them with deadly improvised explosive devices. It is a state sponsor of terror that supports Hezbollah in its attempt to turn democratic Lebanon into an Islamofascist state.

Obama said that Reagan's "direct negotiation" with Gorbachev "over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall." What brought down the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Union, was Reagan's unrelenting resistance to and confrontation with the "evil empire" based on his strategy of "we win, they lose." That was how Reagan "negotiated" with Gorbachev.

Yes, Reagan talked with Gorbachev. But he resisted the Soviet advance from Nicaragua to Grenada to Afghanistan. He put Pershing missiles in Europe. He launched the Strategic Defense Initiative and said "nyet" when Gorbachev wanted us to deal it away. When Reagan said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," the end of the Cold War already was a fait accompli.

Would Obama have done or said any of this?

Obama wants to talk with Iran. But the question he refuses to answer is what he'd tell Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Obama dislikes being called an appeaser. But would he say to Iran: No deal unless you disown and disarm Hezbollah? We doubt it. More likely he'd sacrifice a country such as Lebanon to Tehran's ambitions in a modern-day Munich.

In his book, "Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons," Obama adviser Joseph Cirincione, director of nuclear policy at the center for American Progress, says he favors Israel giving up its nuclear weapons to ensure Iran doesn't obtain nukes. That's called appeasement.

Cirincione also was quoted in 2006 calling Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's nuclear reactor a "failure." But the raid on Saddam Hussein's Osirak nuclear reactor was an unqualified success that kept the Iraqi dictator from having a nuclear weapon when he invaded Iran a decade later.

McCain said that Obama's view of Iran as a "tiny" threat, a view not shared by the Israelis, "betrays the depth of Sen. Obama's inexperience and reckless judgment. These are very serious deficiencies for an American president to possess." Indeed they are.

Obama responded during a campaign stop Monday in Billings, Mont.: "The Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't have one." And he'll probably believe that right up to the moment the phone rings at 3 a.m. and he hears: "Mr. President, Tel Aviv has been nuked.