Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran

Via Ezra, here's Hillary Clinton's Foreign Affairs manifesto in which she hints at some length that she'll bomb Iran if they don't accede to our every wish, wrapping up the riff with this tacked-on bit.

if Iran is in fact willing to end its nuclear weapons program, renounce sponsorship of terrorism, support Middle East peace, and play a constructive role in stabilizing Iraq, the United States should be prepared to offer Iran a carefully calibrated package of incentives.

Which sounds very much to me like we'll give them slightly more than bupkis if they do everything we ask them to do. That all sounds quite like a great recipe to end up in a conflict with Iran, and it sounds like the Hillary team completely misunderstands the concept of incentives, but if she was trying to reconvince the politically literate readers of Foreign Affairs magazine that she's indeed more of a hawk than all of her Democratic rivals, then I think mission accomplished.

Comments

I commented at Ezra's on this, but on further reflection, I'd say she was intent on leaving no room for the GOP candidates to be left of Cheney/Podhoretz, but instead to force them to join the neo-cons advocating an immediate US attack on Iran.

She's saying she'd negotiate first, but with what looks like (but may taste different than) the same recipe as Bush/Cheney: yield to us on our conditions before we negotiate.

However, it could be that she'd negotiate without conditions being met ahead of time, but is laying our (foolishly) what we'd ultimately accept.

There's some pretty fine political and foreign affairs distinctions Hillary's making, so fine that one still can't tell for sure what she'd do if actually in office. But whatever that would be, I'm not inspired to trust her on this one.

Posted by: JimPortlandOR on October 15, 2007 03:50 PM

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