Last month, the Senate passed the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment, which "designates Iran's Revolutionary Guard corps as a terrorist organization." The bill was intellectually incoherent--terrorists, by definition, aren't states--and dangerously aggressive. It made war with Iran more likely.
Jim Webb called the bill "Cheney's fondest pipe dream." It bears the names of two of the Senate's biggest hawks. (Lieberman you know; Kyl is an honorary co-chair of the neconservative Commitee on the Present Danger.) AIPAC not only supported the bill, respected journalist Jim Lobe is reporting that AIPAC wrote it.
The intent and impact of the bill are clear. Do the math: GWOT + Iran is a terrorist state = _____.
Hillary Clinton is the only Democratic presidential candidate who supported the bill. Already in general election mode according to her backers, she calculated that she could get away with casting a prowar vote in the middle of the race for the Democratic nomination.Juan Cole explains:
Clinton's staffers must have read the Opinion Dynamics poll for Fox Cable News, which shows that 80 percent of the U.S. public believe that Iran's nuclear program is for weapons purposes, and 50 percent believe that the U.S. should take a tougher line with Iran (as against 31 percent who do not). About 29 percent of the sample want Bush to go ahead and attack Iran before leaving office, while a bare majority thought he should leave the problem to the next president. Some 54 percent of respondents believed that if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been allowed to visit the site of the Sept. 11 attacks, he would have been intent on honoring the hijackers.
Since the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has been carrying out regular inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities, still cannot find good evidence for a weapons program, the overwhelming consensus to this effect in the U.S. is evidence of successful propaganda by the Bush administration and its enablers in the media. That Ahmadinejad, an Iranian Shiite who has repeatedly denounced Sunni fundamentalism and its terrorist activities, should be viewed as an al-Qaida sympathizer by the American public is a testament to how effectively he has been demonized.
She may have miscalculated. In a clear sign that her campaign sees this issue as a potential liability in the primary, it sent out an unusual mailer to Iowans defending her vote. The literature claims, among other things, that she "exercised leadership" and that her vote was "clearly a vote for stepped up diplomacy."
Clearly, no less. Well, clearly she's full of it.
And clearly it's past time that progressives in blogosphere and elsewhere agressively opposed Hillary.