Hillarysworld

Diplomatic Memo
Iran Policy Now More in Sync With Clinton’s Views
By MARK LANDLER, Published: February 16, 2010


Hillary Rodham Clinton signed autographs on Tuesday at Dar Al-Hekma College in Jidda. (Photo: Susan Baaghil/Reuters)

JIDDA, Saudi Arabia — If Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed especially fired up in criticizing Iran during her visit to the Persian Gulf this week, there was good reason for it: President Obama’s Iran policy is beginning to look a lot like candidate Clinton’s Iran policy.

With the administration’s efforts to reach out to Iran having failed to produce a response, it is shifting to a more confrontational strategy that is tailor-made for Mrs. Clinton, a longtime skeptic of the value of engaging with Tehran. This, after all, is the woman who once warned that if she were president and Iran attacked Israel, the United States would “totally obliterate” Iran.

As the nation’s chief diplomat, Mrs. Clinton avoids that kind of excess in her statements. But only just. She declared on this trip that Iran was on its way to becoming a military dictatorship, that Iran’s religious and political leaders should seize back the reins of power from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and that Iran could ignite a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘Why are they doing this?’ ” Mrs. Clinton said Tuesday to students at a women’s college here, in a bare-knuckles tone that she could have used at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

It is a measure of how much things have changed that Mr. Obama, who clashed repeatedly with Mrs. Clinton about how to deal with Iran during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, has assigned her to drum up international support for a package of United Nations sanctions against Iran.

She has accepted the task with relish. Mrs. Clinton returned to the theme of the Revolutionary Guards often during the trip, twice briefing reporters in the back of her plane about it.

Continues @ The New York Times 2/16/10

There was never a doubt about her approach!