Back on Defense

It wasn't just the White House that struggled to explain away the new intelligence estimate on Iran's nuclear weapons program. The latest intel report has posed a tricky challenge for the presidential candidates—especially those who voted for the recent Senate resolution against Iran's revolutionary guard.

In the Democratic field, that means Hillary Clinton. The New York senator and former first lady, her party's front runner, had just launched a new, stepped-up assault on chief rival Barack Obama, criticizing the scope of his health-care reform plan and the breadth of his presidential ambitions in an effort to slow a burst of momentum that has propelled the Illinois senator into a narrow lead in Iowa, according to the latest poll. The timing of the new National Intelligence Estimate interfered with Clinton's game plan and forced her—for an afternoon, at least—back on the defensive.

At the Tuesday-afternoon debate, sponsored by National Public Radio and held at the State Historical Museum in Des Moines, all of the candidates took shots at President Bush, whose administration had been loudly proclaiming Iran's nuclear intentions until the new report rolled in. But after dispensing with the attacks on the White House, the spotlight shifted to Clinton.

Clinton started by suggesting that the resolution, which urged the Bush administration to brand the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, had been successful. "Since that resolution passed," she explained, "our commanders on the ground in Iraq have announced that we've seen some progress from the Iranians backing off, no longer sending in weapons and materiel, and beginning to withdraw their technical advisers."

That is a risky position at a time when the vast majority of Democrats seem to view virtually any policy connected to the Bush administration as anathema. "That is just what Bush said," says Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director, about Clinton's response. "And she says we're using Republican talking points."

When pressed by NPR's Steve Inskeep, Clinton sought to demonstrate that she was hardly alone in considering Iran a threat—and suggested that her leading rivals had been hypocrites on the issue. "You know, earlier this year, Senator [John] Edwards told an audience in Israel that the nuclear threat from Iran was the greatest threat to our generation," she said. "Back in 2004, Senator Obama told the Chicago Tribune editorial board that he would even consider surgical strikes by missiles to take out Iran's nuclear capacity. So there was a very broadly based belief that they were pursuing a nuclear weapon."