Maureen Dowd: Bomb, bomb, iran

[illinoisprogressive]

Fearful that her questioner was an enemy spy creeping into her perfect little world, she suggested that he had been put up to the question and did not have his information right.

“I take exception,” Mr. Rolph insisted. “This is my own research. ... I’m offended that you would suggest that.”

Hillary apologized and said that she had been asked “the very same question in three other places.” She explained that she had signed on to a rewritten version of the amendment that did not, as he claimed, give a green light for combat.

In the original “sense of Senate on Iran” document, sponsored by Joe Lieberman and the Republican Jon Kyl last month, there was a paragraph that supported “the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence and military instruments, in support of the policy with respect to” Iran. That original draft, called “tantamount to a declaration of war” and “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, was softened.

Even so, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted no, and Barack Obama would have voted no if he had voted.

If you know the dingbat vice president is agitating for a conflict with Iran, if you know that Condi is chasing after Cheney with a butterfly net on Iran and Syria, if you know you can’t believe anything this administration says, why vote to give them more backing on their dysfunctional Middle East policy?

The schism in the administration is deepening in a way that should alarm Hillary. Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper report in today’s Times that Cheney and his hawks are arguing that the Israeli intelligence about Syria’s nascent nuclear capabilities that led to last month’s Israeli strike on Syria was credible and should dictate a harsher policy toward Syria and North Korea, while Condi, Bob Gates and calmer heads “did not believe the intelligence presented so far merits any change in the American diplomatic approach.”

Hillary’s hawkish Iran vote was an ill-advised move, especially given her private view that Cheney is untrustworthy and given Sy Hersh’s New Yorker report claiming that Cheney had pushed to devise a plan to attack the Revolutionary Guard facilities in Iran.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/opinion/10dowd.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

[rodeodance]

1. so---Obama played it safe: "Obama would have voted no if he had voted."

[pingzing58]

2. Thanks for keeping this discussion on the forefront. Hillary was wrong to

vote for this amendment because it's not about going to war idiot, it's about RATIFYING the so called "evidence" presented in the amendment without, as has been pointed out by Dodd, any congressional hearings on the so called evidence that will be used to declare military air strikes on Qud force bases, infrastructure, etc. By voting to recognize the "evidence" she was voting for the reason to attack Iran. The question should be posed to her about the "evidence" and not about a vote to go to war.

[madrchsod]

3. the democrats should`t have shown up

it was a set-up and many fell for it.i am still stunned that some here at du do not understand what that vote means.