Clinton unfairly attacked on Iran vote

AP/Fox News:

Democratic rivals assailed front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton Tuesday for a vote against Iran that they portrayed as misguided and dangerous in light of a new intelligence report that says the Iranians stopped pursuing a nuclear weapon years ago.

One month before Iowa's leadoff caucuses — in a debate broadcast only on radio — the presidential candidates stood together in welcoming the report's assessment and criticizing President Bush's assertion that "nothing's changed" because of it. They divided on the three-month-old Senate vote to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization — a resolution that only Clinton supported among the Democratic candidates. She said her vote was meant to encourage diplomacy, but several of her foes were having none of that and John Edwards said it sounded like war.

Broadcast on NPR, the debate was limited to three subjects: Iran, China and immigration. The Democrats, unlike the campaign's Republican contenders, proposed no drastic crackdown on illegal immigrants. On China, they said more should be done to put U.S. companies on equal footing with Chinese imports, but again they proposed no radical new remedies.

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Edwards did confront Clinton on her characterization of her September Iran vote.

"Declaring a military group sponsored by the state of Iran a terrorist organization, that's supposed to be diplomacy?" Edwards interjected. "This has to be considered in the context that Senator Clinton has said she agrees with George Bush terminology that we're in a global war on terror, then she voted to declare a military group in Iran a terrorist organization. What possible conclusion can you reach other than we are at war?"

Clinton objected. "You know I understand politics and I understand making outlandish political charges, but this really goes way too far," said the New York senator. She is locked in a tight three-way race with Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, and Obama, a senator from Illinois, in this first-voting state.

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The attacks on the Iran vote are silly. Nothing in the NIE refutes the fact that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist arm of the Iranian government that has been used to murder Americans in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. If Obama, Edwards. et.al. do not recognize that or want to sweep that threat under the rug in order to seek negotiations with the religious bigots in charge of Iran they do not understand enough about national security to be President. Iran has been at war with the US since 1979 and the Revolutionary Guard has been the main instrument of that war. We should not ignore those facts in order to appease Iran or the kook base of the Democrat party.