
Do you remember candidate Obama, the guy who said he would sit down and negotiate with Iran- pursue a diplomatic approach with the nefarious regime? How, through his leadership, he’d bring together UN Security Council members to impose sanctions that would force Iran to halt their nuclear ambitions? Well, after 13 months of lost time and wasted efforts it appears that the Obama administration is about to adopt the same Bush policies Obama campaigned against.
As the apprentice President continues to discover, you can’t negotiate with terrorist or terrorist regimes. Regardless of how many times you apologize or placate those with a radical ideology, it will not alter their determination to destroy you. Regardless of whether you try terrorist in military court or in civilian courts, you will not earn their respect. Perhaps the apprentice President has finally learned a lesson from a seasoned President, and that lesson is that it’s his duty to protect and defend this country even if he means you won’t be personally loved.
From the Guardian:
Hillary Clinton’s sudden volley of shots at Iran marks the end of an engagement policy that never really began. She wants to convince the world that the regime in Tehran is opposed to serious talks with the west. That may be true, but we’ll probably never know because in fact, no one has offered such talks.
In laying out the American approach to Iran, Clinton showed how little US foreign policy has changed since the last years of the Bush administration. President Bush famously explained that he would not negotiate with unfriendly regimes because he didn’t want to “reward bad behaviour”. He wanted states like Iran to change of their own accord, not as a result of negotiation but as a pre-condition for being allowed to negotiate.
Clinton embraces this same idea. She rejects the view that as Iran becomes more threatening and approaches nuclear breakout capacity, diplomatic engagement becomes more urgent. Instead she takes the opposite view. “We don’t want to be engaging while they are building their bomb,” she said this week.
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