Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah- BREAKING Iran released WP journalist and three others

[karynnj]

64. That was intentional -- Neither Iran or the climate Change Pact were likely without Kerry

Reestablishing ties with Cube needed an American President with the guts to ignore the right wing anti Castro Cubans and their allies. That was President Obama. Kerry was involved and I think it was Kerry who thought to involve the Pope, but the details were all worked out by others in the administration. Unlike the other two accomplishments, this could have been done with any competent Secretary of State.

It is easy to forget how even a few months before the Iran deal, articles in sources like the Washington Post even used words like delusional and unreasonably optimistic to describe Kerry on the possibility of getting a deal and it suggested that he was wasting too much time on something that would fail. Go back to when he and Zarif, greatly against odds secured the interim agreement -- the coverage was mostly the expectation that the Iranians would violate the agreement and held out little chance for successfully getting a final deal. When the deadline for getting a final deal was both missed and changed to a deadline to get a framework for the final deal, hope was very very low. This changed when a detailed framework was agreed on and it was better than anyone expected ... but, it did not take long for the media to shift back to negativity. Then, Kerry broke his leg ....

On climate change, per many accounts, Kerry wanted that to be a signature issue of his being secretary, but was told by the administration that it was unlikely that they could do much diplomatically. Copenhagen had been pretty much a failure and there seemed no hope of working with the Chinese. On Kerry's first trip to China, he spoke to people he knew from his years attending climate change summits -- and reported back to Obama that the Chinese were open to working with the US. That was the start of the US/China pact, that allowed the Lima conference to be successful and which set the possibilities for Paris.

There was an interesting comment by Ban Ki Moon saying that many people helped -- and he included George W Bush,referring to the fact the approach used had some roots in the Bali conference that happened in 2007, where there had been fear that the US might not participate. They did and were helpful. Having been someone who spent time reading DU JK group then, it brought back things I had not thought of for years. Though it got almost no coverage in the media, at both House and Senate hearings, the Bush team reporting back thanked John Kerry for his help in Bali. In particular, Kerry reached out to China and India. (Here is a link to my response to the Ban Ki Moon article using links from DU2 - http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141297170#post12 - where some of my links to back comments don't work, but they did when I posted it back in 2007!)

I would argue that, like in A WONDERFUL LIFE, if there were no John Kerry, both of these efforts would have failed. Pretty awesome considering one likely avoided another war and the other - if people work hard to make it so - might jumpstart a shift to clean energy.