Watching Olbermann interview HRC tonight, I heard Hillary say the US would use nuclear arms against Iran under certain circumstances.
Is this the first statement that we would in some cases go nuclear against a Muslim country by a major Presidential candidate in this election?
Presumeably, the nuclear option is never completely “off the table”, and one could conjecture ridiculous situations in which we might obliterate anybody. I’d accept that there are conditions under which it would be a good idea, though hoping that we’d all try pretty hard to make sure those conditions never materialize in the first place. But how does a candidate being the one to suggest such a nuke strike in an interview play on the world stage?
She’s posturing and she looks like an ass. She will alienate a lot of folks with that kind of talk. But she is posturing to the folks who she thinks she is in tune with. And in my opinion it’s reason number 6,739 not to vote for HRC.
I don’t know how else she could answer the question. Not taking nukes off the table has basically been US policy for 50 years, she isn’t going to switch that and say she’d not use nukes under any circumstances now. I’m sure Obama would’ve said the same thing, more or less (and McCain would’ve made a little song about it).
"It is a theory that some people have been looking at because there is a fear that if Iran, which I hope we can prevent, becoming a nuclear power, but if they were to become one some people worry that they are not deterrable, that they somehow have a different mindset and a worldview that might very well lead the leadership to be willing to become martyrs.
I don’t buy that but I think we have to test it and one of the ways of testing it is to make it very clear that we are not going to permit them, if we can prevent them, from becoming a nuclear power. But were they to become one, their use of nuclear weapons against Israel would provoke a nuclear response from the United States, which personally I believe would prevent it from happening and that we would try to help the other countries that might be intimidated and bulled into submission by Iran because they were a nuclear power, avoid that state by creating this new security umbrella."
It’s only an hour or so old. The Jesus quote is older and I don’t have it on tap…
An American president saying he/she would never “obliterate” innocent women and children under any circumstances would be a refreshing change of pace at this point.
Why does she need to say she’d use nukes against Iran now as a candidate? Killing thousands of innocent people in order to get the ones you want is not a wise word choice as a candidate.
Because someone asked her what her policy would be. You prefer she should lie?
She said she’d use the threat of nuclear retaliation to deter Iran from using their (hypothetical, future) nuclear weapons. I don’t think that’s as unpopular a view as you seem to, either among the general electorate or even Dem primary voters.
Honestly the hypothetical is rather stupid, as Israel wouldn’t leave much for us to bomb in any case if Iran were to launch a strike against them. But she gave basically the same answer any other candidate except Kucinich would give.
The problem is that she’s running for Presidential Nominee before she’s running for President. The people she’s in tune with are more central and right than her party is. With only half your voter base allowed to vote for you, targetting them is a bit silly.
Look, let’s be frank here, the US would use nukes against Canada “in some circumstances.” Of course those circumstances would have to be pretty extreme, but even the HRC quote we’re dealing with here only applies if Iran has already started what would probably be WW III. This isn’t a radical foreign policy shift, either. I’d be more than comfortable stating, as a definitive, that the US military has contingency plans and scenarios for fighting in every nation on the planet. And if they don’t, someone at the Pentagon hasn’t been doing their job.
Explicitly mentioned the nuclear option? I can’t verify with 100% certainty, but yeah, probably. The others, IIRC, have simply maintained US policy of not taking nukes completely off the table. And to be frank, they do lose their deterrent power if countries admit that they’ll never use 'em.
To be fair, though, Obama, some time ago, already said that he would support bombing Pakistan (with, one would presume, conventional ordinance). In order to get at AQ, of course. And while the ‘going nuclear’ thing will certainly play much worse, I’m not sure that Obama’s stated willingness to bomb another Muslim country due to terrorists, if its leader doesn’t go alogn with what we want him to do, would really play all that much better.
This is standard American policy. If we say we’ll never use nukes, then what’s the point of having them? She’s just saying we may use them in response to someone else (Iran) using them first. Outrage meter reading: 0.
Sorry, no misquoting, at all. “Strike” is a word that in military context almost always means to hit with either a missile or a bomb. Or at the very least, making a military attack.
I suppose you could be arguing that instead of meaning we’d just bomb Pakistan, he was actually threatening to invade and put boots/special forces on the ground in sovereign Pakistani territory.
Do you actually think that’s much better? That Obama might have been suggesting that instead of surgical bombings, we’d invade another sovereign Muslim nation?
Is that honestly your defense of his comments?
And unless you can come up with a version of military “act[ion]” that doesn’t involve either bombing or invasion, that is indeed the corner you’ve painted yourself into.
Nevermind, I should’ve realized that getting in the middle of a HRC/Obama fight during this year’s presidential campaign, on this board, was folly. I’m glad you support Obama so fiercely. Good luck with that.
What HRC said was pretty damn stupid. It was also blatantly manipulative.
It was stupid because every indication we have says that IRAN DOESN’T HAVE NUKES. That was in the newest NIE, but she doesn’t read those.
Israel has about 200 nukes. If Iran tossed a couple towards Tel Aviv, Israel wouldn’t need our help to respond.
We don’t want Iran to get nukes. I assume we’re all in agreement here on that point. Talk big like HRC’s talking, and they will want to get nukes. Rattle sabers like she is doing and she may set off the last thing she wants, a regional arms race; worse, she could very easily drive Iran into the protective arms of Russia or China, two trading partners.
We can use the carrot or the stick, or both, but nothing is guaranteed to work; if you want someone to not do something, and they know you want them to not do something, it’s ferociously stupid to threaten them.
She also threatened Iran with the same kind of retaliation if they hit any country in the Middle East. So now a President Hillary has to extend a defensive umbrella across an entire region where, you may have noticed, we’re not exactly popular right now.
And I hope we can all agree that there is an obvious domestic political component to her comments. Somebody should ask her why does she even bother with the Democratic Party to begin with?
I used to think that I could still vote for her in the general, if she took the nomination away from Obama; at this point, I’m convinced she’s a moron and a fraud and if she was the nominee my choices would be between Republican and Republican-light. Somebody, please make her go away.
Argggg! What the heck is it with this meme?
That is not what the NIE said. It specifically said, in fact, that although it was “plausible” that Iran’s (confirmed by the NIE) nuclear weapons program remained shut down after a several year period, that they did not have evidence of a “sufficient quality or corroborated sufficiently” to “render a solid judgment”.
They certainly said nothing even coming close to “IRAN DOESN’T HAVE NUKES.”
In any case, she was talking about Iran becoming a nuclear power, as in, in the future. Not currently.
You were just supporting the NIE.
Their judgment on that issue was: (block of text quoted to head off claims of cherry picking)
That is, rhetoric like HRC’s almost definitely factors into the “cost-benefit” analysis for Iran.
Sounds like a pretty good way to become more popular. Especially since, well, a large number of ME nations are very, very worried about Iran.
Now please, help us fight ignorance. Kinda like a “pay it forward” situation. The next time you, Airblairxxx, see someone claim that the NIE claimed that “IRAN DOESN’T HAVE NUKES”, please point out the nuance, caveats, and the fact that the NIE spent, essentially, a full 20% of the meat of the report, by defining their terms. And they made clear the difference between topics on which they could render a “solid judgment”, and those on which they could not.
Yea, but the question was “what she would do if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.” It’s not Hillary’s fault that she was asked a stupid hypothetical.
Far be it from me to defend her , but I am wondering if she was sending a message to Iran that just cuz she is a woman and a dem , that some things are not going to change.
Again . . . I will say what I said: That every indication was that Iran doesn’t have nukes.
I know you’re saying that their confidence isn’t extremely high. I grok that. Really, I do.
But that’s irrelevant to my point. I’m looking at this from a domestic political standpoint, and subtleties about the meaning of the NIE are not what concerns me.
What gets me is that as president in a hypothetical nuclear war between Iran and Israel, she would insert the USA into a regional conflict on the other side of the world.
We’ve heard this song and dance before. “We have to get our military involved in the Middle East, don’t care how much it costs, blah blah blah”. Hey, Iran knows we have nukes. Shitloads of 'em. If Iran can be deterred, they already are. If they can’t, do you honestly think that HRC threatening to out-crazy them will make one bit of difference?
She’s posturing as a proactive, police-the-world, fake GOP moron. That doesn’t work, even for real GOP morons. Above all else, I want this election to strangle that worldview in its crib. If she wins the nomination in August, my hope will be lost.
Iran will come at them via their proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. This nuclear deterrence idea of hers will obligate us to extend our military into the region on a more permanent basis than Iraq. That will NOT make us popular; it will cost a lot of money; it is yet another stupid idea.