Hillary closes the barn door after she let the horse out

Ted Belman. Clinton emphasized that she doesn’t believe in a “tough love” American policy toward Israel. That is, policy in which the U.S. levels public criticism at Israel or places diplomatic pressure on Israel out of fear for the country’s future. Clinton said also that if she is elected she will invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to meet at the White House in her first month as president.

Biden: We Want to Meet with Israel to Discuss Security

Remember how apoplectic they both were when Netanyahu announced the construction of 1600 homes in Ramat Shlomo in Jerusalem. Clinton said our move was “insulting”.

Apparently, Netanyahu’s challenge to the Iran Deal has resulted in a renewed effort of the leading Democrats to win us back with promises of security. This is the sweet talk they give us to make the medicine go down whether its is the Iran Deal of the ’67 borders.

I say, back our desire to annex J&S. This would be the only way to make amends.

The NYT reported yesterday Hillary Clinton Backs Iran Nuclear Deal, With Caveats

WASHINGTON — With Donald J. Trump rallying at the Capitol Wednesday against President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, Hillary Rodham Clinton embraced the agreement a short distance away. But she warned it would work only “as part of a larger strategy toward Iran” that contained Tehran’s power in the region as sanctions are lifted.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech, at the Brookings Institution, amounted to a strong endorsement of the deal struck by President Obama and her successor as secretary of state, John Kerry, though one laced with skepticism about Iran’s intentions.

“Diplomacy is not the pursuit of perfection — it is the balancing of risk,” she said, arguing that the risks of walking away from a deal that she helped shape would turn the United States, not Iran, into the international outlier.

Her appearance created a stark juxtaposition in the presidential race as Mr. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas held a joint rally to assail the agreement, with Mr. Trump saying, “Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction as incompetently negotiated as our deal with Iran.”

In her appearance, Mrs. Clinton nevertheless sought to distinguish herself from the president on foreign policy, calling for a tough reassessment of American policy toward Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and she seemed, by implication, to suggest that the Obama administration had not responded strongly enough to the annexation of Crimea and the continuing military action in Ukraine. She noted the recent reports of Russian troops in Syria and argued “we need a concerted effort to up the costs on Russia and Putin — I am in the camp that we have not done enough.”

“I don’t think we can dance around it much longer,” she said, arguing that the Russians were seeking to “stymie and undermine American power whenever and wherever they can.”

But most of her speech and discussion afterward was an effort to navigate a careful line between claiming credit for the Iran deal while also expressing skepticism by positioning herself as tougher than her former boss and perhaps more devoted to keeping rifts with Israel from breaking out into the open. She was clearly positioning herself as the candidate best poised to take on Iran’s challenge and influence in the Middle East.

“Distrust and verify” would be her approach, she insisted, turning Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” line about the Soviet Union on its head. She went on to describe Iran as a “ruthless, brutal regime,” words far harsher than Mr. Obama has used as he has sought to coax the Iranians along in the years of perilous diplomacy. She added, “I will not hesitate to take military action” if Iran seeks to obtain a nuclear bomb despite its commitments, a deliberately stronger formulation than Mr. Obama’s “all options are on the table.”

She also took shots at former Vice President Dick Cheney, who spoke against the deal on Tuesday, reminding her audience of invited guests that the Iranian nuclear program surged ahead during the Bush administration.

But she knew that an endorsement without an explanation of how she would counter Iran would leave many in her Democratic base dissatisfied, so Mrs. Clinton took several opportunities to draw contrasts between her approach to Middle East policy and that of the administration she left 32 months ago. She reiterated her call to arm moderate Syrian rebels, a case she and David Petraeus made when she was secretary of state and he was director of the C.I.A., and she criticized her own record when she said that she and the administration did do enough to support the 2009 uprising in Iran.

Mrs. Clinton’s promise that her approach to the Iranians would be to “confront them across the board” appeared part of an effort to answer one of the chief criticisms of the deal: that the resumed flow of oil revenue into Iran will help it fund proxies like Hezbollah and embolden the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps to conduct what Mrs. Clinton described as “cyberattacks or other nontraditional attacks.” So, she said, the deal must be the starting point of a new American containment strategy.

A crucial part of that strategy, as she described it, would be a stepped-up effort to contain Iran’s military activity in Syria and around the Middle East, and new restrictions on conventional arms to Iran. (She did not mention one of Mr. Kerry’s last concessions, made in July during talks in Vienna, that included the expiration, over eight years, of United Nations embargoes on missile and other conventional arms sales.)

But while she described what amounts to an effort to impose sanctions on Iranian banks and organizations that support terror groups — even as other sanctions linked to nuclear activity are being lifted — she followed a careful path. For example, while she promised to sell F-35 fighter jets and missile defenses to Israel, she said nothing about selling the Israelis the United States’ most powerful bunker-busting bomb, the “Massive Ordnance Penetrator.” Israel has pressed for the weapon because it is the only one that can get into Iran’s deep underground sites, but it would also need America’s giant B-2 bomber to drop it.

Nonetheless, with some of her strongest support coming from American Jews who are skeptical of the deal and its effect on Israel, Mrs. Clinton went further than Mr. Obama in reassuring them. She said she would invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel to the White House in her first month in office — a contrast to Mr. Obama who did not visit Israel in his first term. “Israel has every reason to be alarmed by a regime that both denies its existence and seeks its destruction,” Mrs. Clinton said of Iran.

Unlike Mr. Obama’s speech at American University in July, part of his effort to sell the deal, Mrs. Clinton’s talk on Wednesday worked from the assumption that Iran will try to violate the deal. “We need to be prepared for three scenarios,” she said. “First, Iran tries to cheat.” The second, she said, was that the Iranians would seek to “wait us out” until the world is distracted, and then resume their efforts to enrich uranium, produce plutonium or develop a weapon.

And the third was that Iran would seek to flex its muscles abroad. “We shouldn’t expect that this deal will lead to broader changes in their behavior,” she said.

{FIRST VIEW:Bill Clinton Extolling the Virtues of North Korean Nuclear Deal

Mrs. Clinton left the State Department in early 2013. Later that year, in the midst of international talks, the Obama administration agreed publicly that Iran could continue to enrich uranium, completing the shift in policy that had been set in motion before Mrs. Clinton left her post. Mrs. Clinton’s role in this critical early debate hasn’t been previously reported and shows that Democratic presidential front-runner and her top aide, Mr. Sullivan, were key players in the Iran deal. Given united Republican opposition to the deal, the issue is likely to be central in the 2016 election.

COMMENTARY REPORTS:

Yet this doesn’t jive with the portrait of Clinton’s diplomatic outreach to Iran painted by the Journal. Just like her successor, Clinton was stymied by Iran’s refusal to back down from its insistence on retaining its nuclear options. But rather than hang tough on the West’s demands that Iran give up enriching uranium, Clinton folded. As it turns out, it would be Clinton and not Kerry who would make the fatal decision to bow to Iran’s hardliners and grant them the very concessions on enrichment that the West had previously refused to countenance. As the Journal notes, her aides concede that during her time at the State Department, Clinton went from being a hard “no” on enrichment to a more equivocal stand. From that point on, Iran nuclear concessions became the norm.