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Rivals Dog Clinton On Her Iran Vote

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By BETH FOUHY, The Associated Press

Published: December 5, 2007

DES MOINES, Iowa - Democratic rivals assailed front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton on 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 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 3-month-old Senate vote to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, a resolution that among the Democratic candidates only Clinton supported. 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. Their interaction was relatively civil compared with the sniping between the campaigns of Clinton and rivals Barack Obama and Edwards in recent days.

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

"Declaring a military group sponsored by the state of Iran a terrorist organization, that's supposed to be diplomacy?" Edwards said. "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.

"None of us is advocating a rush to war," Clinton said.

Joe Biden, a senator from Delaware who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, responded that "terminology matters."

"It's not about not advocating a rush to war," he said. "I'm advocating no war."

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