Hillary Clinton sounds almost hurt that Iran has so far shunned America’s diplomatic advances. “We haven’t had any response … We’ve certainly reached out,” she says.
Poor thing.
Maybe, however, we should not be entirely surprised that Iranians are stubborn about “reaching out” to the Secretary of State. Just over a year ago, she was trying to reach the White House by threatening to “totally obliterate them.”
A year is not necessarily a long time in diplomacy.
I just got around to watching these, and I have to say: in the second video, Clinton is exactly right. The author of this post carefully left out her antecedent in your blurb about the vid, but the premise was IF Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel, we would take part in the total obliteration of Iran. If Iran obtains nuclear weapons, I hope they understand the consequences of using them to be total annihilation. This is the basis of mutually assured destruction and the only reason the Cold War stayed cold. We can live with a nuclear armed Iran, and should under no circumstances go to war to prevent them from obtaining nuclear technology. However, nonfriendly nuclear actors can only be lived with as long as they are not atomically belligerent. MAD is how that situation is assured. Clinton, at least in that video, seems to understand all of this a god deal better than Mr. Gray. Ultimately, I find Clinton’s explanation for the Iranian silence in the first video much more compelling than Mr. Grey’s. Whatever else they are, the Iranian elite aren’t stupid.