Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Did Hillary Flip Flop on Rogue State Dictators?   [Byron York]

Readers are sending links to a report from April which supposedly shows Hillary Rodham Clinton advocating the very thing — talking with rogue-state dictators — that she criticized Barack Obama for last night. The report is from CBS/AP, dated April 22:

Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday criticized President Bush's foreign policy, and said if she were president she would do things differently, including beginning diplomatic talks with supposed enemies and sending envoys throughout the world.

"I would begin diplomatic discussions with those countries with whom we have differences, to try to figure out what is the depth of those differences," said Clinton, who spoke to about 1,000 people at Luther College in Decorah in northeastern Iowa."

Far be it for me to be Sen. Clinton's chief defender, but the issue last night was whether the president himself, or herself, would meet, "separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration…with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea." Obama said yes, and Clinton said no. But Clinton pledged more diplomacy than the Bush administration. "I will use a lot of high-level presidential envoys to test the waters, to feel the way," she said. "But certainly, we're not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and, you know, the president of North Korea, Iran and Syria until we know better what the way forward would be."

Is that a flip-flop from what she said in April? I don't see it. What she seemed to realize last night, and what Obama didn't seem to realize, was that it would be extremely unwise to give Ahmadinejad, Assad, Chavez, Castro, and Kim personal sessions with the president of the United States — especially when there is no promise of any benefit to the national interest. The only benefit of that would be for the rogue leaders' propaganda, and, as Sen. Clinton said, "I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes." Isn't that obvious? And entirely consistent with what she said in April?

07/24 10:30 AMShare