REPORT: Hillary Clinton Would Have Tanked The Iran Nuclear Deal

[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.”