If Hillary doesn't speak out at the UN today against the Iran letter, she will signal to the world

[leveymg]

130. You mean, is this the sort of spectacle of ambivalence we should expect if she's the candidate?

Last edited Tue Mar 10, 2015, 08:48 PM - Edit history (1)

The Democratic Party is deeply ambivalent about any opening to Iran. We've been conditioned by years of being told that Iran presents an existential threat, which when events catch up and conclusions have to be stated in a CIA estimate, the specific nuclear threat is continually denied in published intelligence documents. Continuous resets about Iran's program, always projected another 7 years in advance, leads to ambiguity and doubt that we really have a policy and that Iran really has a nuclear weapons program. Such fundamental uncertainty has some nasty, long-term effects on policy and politics.

Ambivalence is right at the heart of Israel's nuclear policy, and like its predecessor, this Administration seems to be playing a game of good cop-bad cop with Netanyahu, always with a view toward imposing lines in the sand around Iran. That is ironic, in view of the fact that Iran originally came by its incipient nuclear program because of CIA policies of winking and nodding as AQ Khan sold old, broken-down Pakistani centrifuges and defective bomb plans to Iran, Iraq and several others during the late 1980s and into the 1990s. Ambiguity is very much a touchstone of Israel's policy of its threats against Iran - is this another bluff by Bibi or maybe he really will drop all those bunker busters we've been selling them, always with the threat of escalation and triggering of Israel's always deniable nuclear capability?

Reflecting on this, and the present soon-to-be-completed, maybe not, negotiations, I see Hillary's own ambiguity about her views toward current diplomacy to be entirely in keeping with this larger policy of bluff and ambiguity. This is actually a form of blackmail, disturbing for America because we actually fear the use of Israel's large arsenal of nuclear weapons far more than anything Iran might have cobbled together. This has created uncertainty about a nearly existential issue - will America be brought into yet another meat grinder in the Persian Gulf if Hillary is elected? That's a serious question, and one that Hillary the candidate played upon in arranging her grand spectacle today. We've been manipulated, again. Expect more like it, as further episodes of this world-straddling 13-episode political drama is unveiled.

That's what's been bugging me about this -- Hillary's politics of ambiguity and spectacle -- and why it has taken a bit of working through to see some order and meaning in all this.