On Campaign Presidential Candidates, No Longer On Guard Against Iran?washingtonpost.com
On Campaign Presidential Candidates, No Longer On Guard Against Iran?
Made popular 1997 days ago in Politics
blog.washingtonpost.com — At campaign headquarters across the nation, one can only imagine foreign policy advisers yesterday were busily ripping out the chapter on Iran from their candidate playbooks. The surprise intelligence community turnabout on Tehran's supposed nuclear threat upended one of the fundamental assumptions about the 2008 presidential election on both sides of the aisle - namely the belief that Iran perhaps even more than Iraq would be the dominant foreign policy issue of the year.

The issue had already to some degree overtaken Iraq in recent months as the most divisive foreign policy question on the Democratic side, where Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and former senator John Edwards (N.C.) have been assailing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) for voting for a bipartisan non-binding resolution labeling Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. At the Democratic debate in Philadelphia on Oct. 30, the candidates mentioned the word Iran 69 times, compared to 44 for Iraq. With the security situation in Iraq improving, Iran was turning into the next test for how Democrats would take on President Bush.

Democratic candidates predictably enough used the report to bash Bush for trying to rush the country into another war, but they also took the opportunity to jab each other. Edwards and Obama both targeted Clinton, although neither used her name. "This is exactly the reason that we must avoid radical steps like the Kyl-Lieberman bill declaring Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, which needlessly took us closer to war," Edwards said.

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Posted by Jane60
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Who do you believe among the Democratic Candidates stands to gain the most from the National Intelligence Estimate Report?
Joe Biden
6.1%
Dennis Kucinich
13%
Barack Obama
71%
Chris Dodd
2.2%
John Edwards
3.9%
Bill Richardson
0.6%
Hillary Clinton
3.4%
This is not a scientific survey, click here to learn more. Results may not total 100% due to rounding and voting descrepencies.
User Comments
Jane60
Posted 1998 days ago
0 up votes, 0 down votes
If memory serves me well, Barack was the first Presidential Candidate to proclaim diplomacy with Iran.
mempko
Posted 1997 days ago
0 up votes, 0 down votes
Where is Mike Gravel in this list? If memory serves me, it was Mike Gravel to talk about Iran as friends, not as enemies.
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