For those of you who haven't already noticed, I am a huge fan of Countdown with Keith Olbermann. He is one of the best newscasters I have seen, and has had the courage to call "BS" when he sees it. I was very surprised with his interview with Hillary Clinton this evening. She even more adamantly reiterated her position on an "umbrella of deterrence" towards middle-eastern countries should Iran launch a nuclear attack against a any of them. I am watching this on my computer so I can rewind and replay it over and over again and pause and start it again and here is my transcript of the response she gave to Keith's request for a follow-up on the response she gave to the debate last week regarding Iran and nuclear weapons. I am shocked. Video will arise as soon as I can get it. My transcript on the flip
Update: Honored to be on the rec list!
Here's the video:
"Well what we were talking about was the potential for a nuclear attack by Iran, if Iran does achieve what appears to be it's continuing goal of obtaining nuclear weapons, and I think deterrence has not been effectively used in recent times, we used it very well during the Cold War when we had a bipolar world, and what I think the president should do and what our policy should be is to make it very clear to the Iranians that they would be risking massive retaliation were they to launch a nuclear attack on Israel. In addition, if Iran were to become a nuclear power, it could set off an arms race that would be incredibly dangerous and destabilizing because the countries in the region are not going to want Iran to be the only nuclear power. So I can imagine that they would be rushing to obtain nuclear weapons themselves. In order to forestall that, creating some kind of a security agreement where we said, 'No, you do not need to acquire nuclear weapons if you were the subject of an unprovoked nuclear attack by Iran the United States and hopefully our NATO allies would respond to that as well.' 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 it, from becoming a nuclear power, but were they to become so, 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 bullied into submission by Iran because they were a nuclear power, avoid that fate by creating this new security umbrella."
WOW! I don't know what to say. If this is Hillary's experience as a Washington insider, then we need to clean house more than I thought. This is absolutely astonishing that a DEMOCRAT would suggest that we would sign anything that would bind us to the use of our nuclear arsenal for anything. Our nukes are there in my view as a shield. I think complete disarmament is unfeasable, and that the deterrence that it does provide is the only reason we keep it around. I cannot fathom a situation where the use of nuclear arms, which would take out entire cities when they detonate, would be useful. I see no purpose in the murder of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of innocent civilians to retaliate against a military. We have several more effective, small scale weapons that can destroy military installations without batting an eye.
I have never in my short lifetime (which is entirely post-cold war mind you)heard a politician make a public threat of using nuclear arms ever, much less tying them to an attack on another nation, but this goes beyond that. This talks about using our nukes to defend an entire region, arguably the most unstable in the world. Beyond the lunacy of offering our nuclear arsenal to an entire region of the world, she misplaced a couple of facts along the way. The most glaring of which is the last NIE(reported on here) that stated that Iran suspended it's nuclear weapons program in 2003. She also seems to forget that meeting Putin had with Ahmadinejad(reported on here), where they stopped just short of "we will defend you if you are attacked." It would seem that Russia is developing ties with Iran that would certainly play into any nuclear intervention with Iran and would likely be our demise should Russia attempt to launch nukes at us. The Russians will always act as a check on our nuclear power, as they are supposed to, and as we are to be to them. This really is an amazing suggestion.
Shoulda stuck with this answer from the CNN debate those eons ago:
"We're not going to engage in these hypotheticals. I mean one of the jobs of a president is being very reasoned in approaching these issues. And I don't think it's useful to be talking in these kinds of abstract hypothetical terms."