I saw firsthand the threats you face every day. I feel that I understand on a very personal level those threats. The challenges in your own backyard -- rise of Islamic radicalism, use of terrorism, and the spread of nuclear technology and weapons of mass destruction-- represent an unprecedented threat to the world and Israel.Because Variety's Peter Bart reports that he has rather dramatically changed his tune:At the top of these threats is Iran. Iran threatens the security of Israel and the entire world. Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons. For years, the US hasn�t done enough to deal with what I have seen as a threat from Iran. As my country stayed on the sidelines, these problems got worse. To a large extent, the US abdicated its responsibility to the Europeans. This was a mistake. The Iranian president�s statements such as his description of the Holocaust as a myth and his goals to wipe Israel off the map indicate that Iran is serious about its threats....
Iran must know that the world won�t back down ... To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options on the table, Let me reiterate -- ALL options must remain on the table.
Adam Venit, a honcho at Endeavor, hosted a reception for John Edwards at his agency the other day....That's a pretty dramatic turnabout -- much more so than the more cautious language he took when talking about Iran to The Prospect's Ezra Klein. I guess this means that Edwards has also adopted the view that the United States is now the greatest threat to world peace anywhere, too, as so many of its leaders -- including Edwards himself! -- have said they won't take that very same option off the table. How a serious presidential candidate could so rapidly go from taking a foreign policy position to saying that people who share that position are a grave threat to world peace is beyond me. It's one thing to repudiate a vote from 2002 -- it's quite another to repudiate a position taken in a high-profile foreign policy speech just a month ago. How is anyone supposed to trust that he means anything that he says now? The man already ran for office on a national ticket. He cannot be so ignorant of foreign affairs that he did not know what he was saying in January. He has no excuses. He was not misled by false intelligence and a mood of national panic in January, as he may have been in 2002. He voluntarily laid out his positions before an audience he voluntarily chose to address. And now he takes the position that the people he chose to speak to -- and the position he took before them -- represent a threat to world peace.The aggressively photogenic John Edwards was cruising along, detailing his litany of liberal causes last week until, during question time, he invoked the "I" word -- Israel. Perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace, Edwards remarked, was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. As a chill descended on the gathering, the Edwards event was brought to a polite close.
As John Judis noted, "It's not that [Edwards] has a fairly definite foreign policy, but adjusts his views to audiences and the circumstances. He has none, zero."
UPDATE: John Edwards says the Variety article is erroneous. His campaign released a statement saying that Edwards "did not say nor does he believe that the greatest threat to world peace is the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. Senator Edwards said, as he has in the past, that Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon is one of the greatest short-threats to world peace." There's been no retraction yet from Variety.
UPDATE 2: Variety says it is sticking by its story.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
