Bush sees calls for Iran talks as 'appeasement'

US President George W. Bush yesterday decried his critics' calls for negotiations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as comparable to the "appeasement" of Adolf Hitler before World War II.

Mr Bush's comment in a speech to Israel's Parliament was widely interpreted as a swipe at Democratic presidential frontrunner Barack Obama, who has advocated talks without preconditions with leaders of such hostile nations as Iran and Cuba.

Though Mr Bush did not name names, Mr Obama quickly issued a blistering response accusing the president of launching a "false political attack".

But the White House denied Mr Bush was referring to the Illinois senator when, drawing parallels to the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, he denounced those he said had urged him to talk to "terrorists and radicals".

Mr Bush's rebuff to his critics also followed a Middle East visit by former President Jimmy Carter, who met Hamas leaders shunned by Israel and Washington and urged efforts to draw the militant group into the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Mr Bush used his speech to the Israeli Knesset to ratchet up his rhetoric against Iran, saying Washington stood by the Jewish state in opposing Tehran's "nuclear weapons ambitions".

But his words also resonated in the presidential campaign, which has increasingly overshadowed him in his final year in office as the Democratic candidates have sharpened criticism of his foreign policy, including the unpopular war in Iraq.

Mr Bush, who has refused any contact with Mr Ahmadinejad, said the Iranian President "dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map", and lumped him together in an anti-Israel camp with Hamas, Hizbollah and Osama bin Laden.

"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before," Mr Bush said.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history," he added.

Mr Ahmadinejad has come in for international criticism for saying that Israel should be "wiped off the map" and questioning whether the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews actually took place. Iran also backs Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel's destruction.