REPORT: Hillary Clinton Would Have Tanked The Iran Nuclear Deal

[kaleckim]

Then there's this too, what a great, "progressive" choice Democrats have made:

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/05/05/trump-unifier-are-hillary-clinton-and-neoconservatives-ready-join-forces

Trump as Unifier: Are Hillary Clinton and Neoconservatives Ready to Join Forces?

'Neocon elites are probably the likeliest faction to defect to Clinton, and what they'd want is blood-curdling aggressiveness overseas and Benjamin Netanyahu in charge of Middle East policy.'

...With Trump at the head of the GOP ticket, Schmidt predicted on Chris Matthews' show earlier this week, "You're going to see a concerted and organized effort by the Hillary Clinton campaign to go after senior members of the Republican foreign policy establishment — big names. I'm not trying to put a partisan imprint on David Petraeus. But names like Petraeus, retired General Odierno, Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft. Men and women who served in senior positions, in national security positions, in Republican administrations. The Clinton campaign's going to go after them. They're going to go after them forcefully."

On Wednesday, the Clinton campaign at least hinted at this approach by posting a list of people it described as "prominent activists, journalists and elected officials" in the Republican Party who have decided to reject Trump, quoting some who explicitly said they would vote for Clinton if she ends up as the Democratic nominee. A verbatim sampling from the list (which was further updated by the campaign on Thursday) follows:

Lifelong Republican, foreign policy expert Max Boot: “[Hillary Clinton] would be vastly preferable to Trump.’”
Billionaire Bush-backer Mike Fernandez: “If I have a choice — and you can put it in bold — if I have a choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton, I’m choosing Hillary.”

Elliott Abrams, former foreign policy advisor for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush: “won’t be voting for Trump”
According to journalist and political commentator Sam Sacks, who spoke with D.C.-based Sputnik Radio about the same dynamic on Thursday, observers can expect to "see a lot of the neoconservatives, people who were, ironically, very close in the George W. Bush administration... coming home and supporting Clinton, who has a foreign policy record that hews pretty neoconservative."

[hrmjustin]

1. Oh please! Hillary supported the deal.

[still_one]

3. Thank you

[kaleckim]

5. She's a hawk

and will be a disaster on foreign policy, as far from progressive on foreign policy as Dick Cheney. She also DIDN'T support the deal, read the damn Times article being discussed. Politics is complex and, this may be news to you, politicians sometimes do things behind the scenes that are different than what they say in public. Is this news to you?

[hrmjustin]

7. Revisionist history is bull!

She made clear her position.

[kaleckim]

9. What the hell is revisionist?

Address the contents of the NYT article. Just once can you Clinton supporters just deal with reality and facts, and be adults? In 2008, she said Obama was naive for wanting to negotiate with them, supported sanctions, but didn't support the negotiations. So, why did she support the sanctions? Come on, be honest, she does have an extremely hawkish foreign policy record, aligns with right wing hawks like Netanyahu (and what did that man say about Iraq before the invasion?), is very supportive of regime change and prefers sticks to carrots.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-iran-sanctions_us_5728dc4ce4b096e9f08f46b3

WASHINGTON — A key talking point of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is the story of how she laid the groundwork for the nuclear agreement with Iran during her time as Secretary of State by convincing the international community to join the U.S. in hitting Iran with crippling sanctions. While her role in sanctioning Iran is well-documented, it is less clear whether her ability to apply pressure on Iran, a long-time U.S. adversary, would have translated into an ability to bring about the diplomatic accord finalized last year.

Clinton was “skeptical” of negotiating with the Iranians from the outset, the New York Times reported on Monday. In the lead up to the 2008 election, she accused her rival, then Sen. Barack Obama (Ill), of naiveté for his offer to meet with U.S. adversaries without preconditions. She later agreed to meet with Omani intermediaries in 2011, but remained more cynical than her boss that negotiations would produce an agreement favorable to the U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/us/politics/for-hillary-clinton-and-john-kerry-divergent-paths-to-iran-nuclear-talks.html?_r=2&referer=

Mrs. Clinton agreed to explore the proposal but was dubious that it would go anywhere. “Even under the best of circumstances,” she wrote later, “this was a long shot.” It would be 18 months before she took up the sultan on his offer and dispatched a team of diplomats to Oman to meet with the Iranians.

“Hillary and company were skeptical,” he said in an interview. The president, on the other hand, was intrigued by the prospect of an Omani channel, twice telephoning the sultan to ask him about it. “He was genuinely curious about trying to find an out-of-the-box approach to change the dynamic,” Mr. Kerry recalled.

The Iran nuclear deal, signed last year after months of direct negotiations with Iranian officials, is likely to be remembered as Mr. Obama’s most consequential diplomatic achievement. In Mrs. Clinton’s campaign to succeed him, she is claiming her share of the credit for it. The multinational sanctions regime that she cobbled together helped pull Iran’s government to the bargaining table. The team she eventually sent to Oman, she likes to say, “set the table” for Mr. Kerry’s diplomatic banquet.

But the behind-the-scenes story of Mrs. Clinton’s role is more complicated than her public account of it. Interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration officials paint a portrait of a highly cautious, ambivalent diplomat, less willing than Mr. Obama to take risks to open a dialogue with Iran and increasingly wary of Mr. Kerry’s freelance diplomacy. Her decision to send her own team, some officials said, was driven as much by her desire to corral Mr. Kerry as to engage the Iranians.

...After she left the State Department, Mrs. Clinton diverged from Mr. Obama on a central tactical question: whether to impose harsh new sanctions on the Iranians after they elected Hassan Rouhani, who had run for president seeking better relations with the West to ease Iran’s economic isolation. Mrs. Clinton was swayed by many in Congress, as well as by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who argued Iran was so desperate for a deal that tightening the vise would have extracted better terms.

“She would have squeezed them again,” a person who has worked with her for several years said, “and the only debate is what they would have done.”

[karynnj]

14. In the words of the NYT, it's more complicated

She did, very importantly, support the deal once it was made. This is important, no matter whether you view her support as enthusiastic or rather weak. What was MOST important is that had she gone on record against it -- that could have led to more Democrats voting with Schumer and Menendez to kill it.

What is also true is that HRC was not in favor of doing this in the first place. No surprise that was her position in 2008. The NYT article contrasts Obama, and even more John Kerry, as being very open to creating a bridge to make this deal and HRC, who was concerned about doing this.

Beyond the NYT article, if you followed her reaction at the various points of the hard won fight to get this deal, she was at best ambivalent. Early on, when Kerry first started to negotiate, she backed increasing sanctions - something that would have killed any hopes of the negotiation. In addition, with each step - the first interim deal through the framework to the final deal - she never took a forward position in support - often expressing doubts (as did Jake Sullivan) that a good enough deal could be made. (or after the framework was out and impressed people, Clinton allies had a few articles suggesting she would have negotiated a better deal.)

If you look, you can find an Obama speech and a Kerry speech from the day the agreement was made. Both thanked a very long list of people who they said did tremendous work on this. Neither listed Hillary Clinton, the expected Democratic nominee in 2016. Given who she is, not naming her was obviously not an oversight.

Her role - up to that point - was in working with her peers to get the international sanctions in place. Later, her role was that and that she did not join Schumer in derailing it.

I suspect that the reason behind the NYT article is that HRC completely inflated her own position on the actual diplomacy on this - in one debate and a speech suggesting that Kerry merely finalized an agreement that she and Sullivan negotiated. For any foreign policy reporter who covered the endless hours of negotiations, the broken and then extended deadlines for 18 months - long after both Sullivan and Clinton were out of office, those claims had to be maddening dishonest. (As a bonus - she did the SAME thing on the US/China and Paris Agreement.)

So, while she deserves credit for her role on the sanctions and on supporting Obama, rather than Schumer, from the NYT article it is entirely safe to say a President Clinton would NOT have started the negotiations with Iran - and certainly would not have green lighted John Kerry doing anything at all as Senator.

[oasis]

2. Woulda, coulda shoulda. The fact is, Hillary backs Obama's position. nt

[tk2kewl]

19. Not exactly...

Hillary Clinton breaks with Obama, threatens war to enforce Iran deal

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/9/hillary-clinton-threatens-war-enforce-iran-deal/?page=all

[puffy socks]

4. More completely expected bS from a BS supporrter

According to her campaign, Clinton was referring to her first 18 months as secretary -- from January 2009 to June 2010. During this time, U.S. and global sanctions on Iran increased, it’s fair to say that Clinton and the State Department played a major role in this development.

In June 2010, the United Nations Security Council approved tough new sanctions on Iran -- including expanding an arms embargo and restricting certain financial and shipping enterprises. At the time, Obama called them "the toughest sanctions ever faced by the Iranian government."

Those sanctions enabled even tougher measures from the United States and the European Union, which were passed immediately. Congress passed several more bills containing additional sanctions on Iran during the rest of Clinton’s tenure, which ended in early 2013.

While the Treasury is the primary agency responsible for enforcing sanctions, Clinton appointed a special adviser in 2010 to oversee U.S. efforts "to ensure full and effective implementation of all U.N. Security Council resolutions related to Iran, including most recently UNSCR 1929."

Experts told us that Clinton is correct to take some of the credit for the rapid increase in international sanctions on Iran, and these sanctions were a big part of the reason why Iran rejoined multilateral talks about its nuclear program.


Beyond the multilateral effort, Clinton’s team also played a role in the sanctions that Congress passed, said Richard Nephew, an expert on sanctions with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. Lawmakers would not have written that legislation without consulting the State Department and the administration (as evidenced in this 2010 New York Times article). Nephew noted, though, that Congress did pass some sanctions that went further than the administration’s wishes.

"Without Secretary Clinton's good diplomacy -- and the message that she radiated down the system to make this a priority and so forth -- you can argue that the reductions would not have been as steep or as lasting," Nephew said.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/nov/23/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-she-helped-usher-iran-negotia/

[kaleckim]

8. What you posted has nothing to do with the video

or the contents of the NYT article. Watch the video once again, see what he says about the Iranian deal and what she said and did publicly versus behind the scenes (and why, once again aligning with a far right wing extremist hawk in Netanyahu).

I also am not a "BS supporter". I supported him this election cycle because of his stances on issues and his record, you thinking I partake in identify politics is pure projection. It isn't Bernie or bust for most people, it's the issues or bust, and you chose a center-right, neoliberal, deeply unpopular and un-trusted war hawk.

[puffy socks]

10. She wouldnt have prevented the deal

My post directly addressed that. Ive been involved with politics for over 30 years.

Sanders record for military action beats by far Hillary's one vote.

I am also tired of the lack of context , edited videos to make them appear how you want. Nice Republican trick.

[kaleckim]

12. No, your logic is fuzzy and confused

Her hawkish record is not just one freaking vote, are you kidding me? Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Honduras, Haiti, Venezuela (and other left of center governments in Latin America), her hawkish stances regarding Russia and China, her calls for a more "muscular foreign policy" and citing Kissinger, and everyone (including the neocons) recognize and acknowledge that she is a hawk. I'm sorry you chose to back a hawk, but you did, and you can't invent your own reality in order to feel better about that.

Regarding your post, the point is that she takes credit for a deal she didn't ultimately support, didn't think would work, and made clear she wouldn't have done the deal if she were president. She would have applied pressure and rattled cages, cause that's what she does. She cannot take credit for this deal in any way shape or form (since she did support sanctions but not the type of diplomacy Obama took part in) and isn't honest about her role. Your post was just about giving her credit for the deal by backing the sanctions, which again, has nothing to do with the video or the articles (and is also not convincing anyway).

[puffy socks]

15. Keep on trying...

Learn some actual history and facts. You are the one inventing your own reality and that's a bubble no one will be able to pull you out of . Too bad.
Your candidate has lost. There's no way he's flipping 400+ delegates especially with the actions of his rabid supporters.
You'll still not have a positive effect on changing things to the left if these ultra Progressives can't control their, lies, projection and vitriol about Clinton. Not only are you already enemies with anyone on the right you are rapidly burning bridges on the left.


My post was about proving she helped the deal which you said would have never happened with Clinton involved. It would have , and it DID with Clinton involved , therefore you are wrong.

I know that's a hard thing for Sanders supporters to admit..which is why I've never seen one admit any negatives about Sanders or that you bs claims about Hillary are rw hit pieces.

so I expect the continued posting of lies by the supporters of the campaign with "integrity" ...its been interesting watching this cognitive dissonance play out.

btw your hero also voted to go to Libya, Kosovo, Iraq 98, and loves Daniel Ortega --who turned out to be no better than the previous dictator. --so wise is Bernie.

[kaleckim]

17. Sorry

where were the history or facts? What the hell does this have to do with Sanders? I agree, he is almost certain to lose, and this post wasn't about him. YOU injected him because you are incapable of defending her.

"My post was about proving she helped the deal which you said would have never happened with Clinton involved"

You didn't prove anything, you kind of tried to, but your post gave credit to her; the video, the article demolished the logic behind that. You are doing nothing more than copying and pasting the type of thing I could find on her campaign website, you drop the mic and think you've nailed it. You haven't. You don't know history because you can repeat talking points fed to you by people smarter than yourself. One last time, read this slowly if it helps, she said that Obama was naive to try a deal like that in 2008, did not want to negotiate the deal and didn't think it would succeed, and supported sanctions on the country after she left the State Department. Your argument, which is just regurgitating her claims, is contradicted by everything else now emerging, which is kind of the point.

"btw your hero"

My hero is Noam Chomsky. Bernie Sanders is a decent man and isn't, like your center-right candidate, corrupt. He takes stances on issues that I agree with and would benefit me as a working person. That's it. He's a decent man and is a far better candidate than the train wreck the Democrats decided on, a person that will have the lowest net favorables of any major candidates in polling history, if someone other than Trump gets the nomination. Again, you keep injecting Sanders into the conversation because you are incapable of discussing Clinton in isolation. If you can't inject him you will a Republican for the same reason.

Your 30 years in politics haven't amounted to anything. Maybe step aside, since your generation inherited a country in much better shape than the one you are handing over to us (across the board), and let us try to clean up the mess you created.

[tk2kewl]

20. Hillary Clinton breaks with Obama, threatens war to enforce Iran deal

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/sep/9/hillary-clinton-threatens-war-enforce-iran-deal/?page=all

[Kokonoe]

6. Old news,

she also is proud to think Russian forces should obey a no fly zone enforced by the U.S.A.

[amborin]

11. here is Hillary back a few yrs w/ James Baker: Laughing about bombing Iran:

Is this an appropriate attitude to have concerning unleashing deadly weapons against another
country? Don't we need someone who approaches war and bombing with more appreciation
for the horrors of war and all that it entails?

[kaleckim]

13. Nope

but her supporters don't care at all.

[RufusTFirefly]

16. Don't worry. Only the Bad Guys commit war crimes. We're the Good Guys.

Michael: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
Kay Adams: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don't have men killed.
Michael: Oh. Who's being naive, Kay?

[FlatBaroque]

21. GOD I hate Her. /

[MisterP]

22. haaaHAAAAAAA

[Arugula Latte]

18. Neoc-lint-on