And he had a great opportunity to come out as a 'bomber' in Russert's interview last weekend, but stressed negotiations with Tehran instead. If he is an 'establishment' pick, he looks more dovish than either Hillary or Obama at this point.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16903253/page/2/print/1/displaymode/1098/MR. RUSSERT: Do you think that the Bush administration is planning for a war in Iran?
SEN. EDWARDS: I don’t know. I don’t know. I hope not. I don’t know. I think that there’s a legitimate concern about Iran getting a nuclear weapon. We should be concerned about that for a lot of reasons, including the possibility that, first, that they would use it; second, that it could, could nuclearize the Middle East, the most volatile place on the planet. But what’s disturbing is that we’re not dealing with this in a smart way at all, in my judgment. Here—what we’ve got is a radical leader, Ahmadinejad, who’s bellicose in his rhetoric about America, bellicose in his rhetoric about nuclear weapons and about Israel, but he is not politically stable in his own country. He is—first of all, the political elite have largely left him, there are religious leaders who have left him. He was elected on a platform of economic reform and strengthening the middle class and lifting people out of poverty. He hasn’t done anything about any of those things. What he’s doing instead is he gives speeches and he travels around the world drawing attention to himself. And what this has done is it has begun to isolate him from his own people.
Now, what would strengthen him? A military strike by America against Iran would strengthen him. They would rally around this guy. On top of that, we would see retaliation. It’d be hard for them to get to us, except through terrorists, but they—we got 100,000-plus American men and women right next door, and there—a lot of us believe that there’s an infrastructure for retaliation if that were to happen. What—what’s much smarter for us to do, certainly now, for the time being—no American president should ever take any option off the table—but what’s smarter for us to do now is to continue to tap into this growing isolation between this radical leader and his own people.
And what should be done, in my judgment, is we ought—we ought to work with our friends in Europe. You know, actually, the banking institutions in Europe have been pretty good about being tough on Iranian banks. The governments have been less good. But we ought to put an offer of both sticks and carrots on the table. We ought to make it clear that there are things that America and the Europeans are willing to do—it’d be great if we could get the Russians and the Chinese to participate—but certainly the Europeans, they have economic leverage with Iran. And those things include making the nuclear fuel available to them, controlling the cycle—this has been offered before—but combining that with a set of economic incentives that will be very attractive to the people in, in Iran who’re already feeling an isolation from this president. And then on the stick side say, ‘But there will be consequences if you don’t give up your nuclear program. And the consequences are the economic decline that you’re seeing within your own country will be accelerated, and it will be accelerated because the bank—the banks in Europe and the European governments will not continue to do economic business with Iran.’
MR. RUSSERT: Would President Edwards allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon?
SEN. EDWARDS: I—there’s no answer to that question at this moment. I think that it’s a—it’s a—it’s a very bad thing for Iran to get a nuclear weapon. I think we have—we have many steps in front of us that have not been used. We ought to negotiate directly with the Iranians, which has not, not been done. The things that I just talked about, I think, are the right approach in dealing with Iran. And then we’ll, we’ll see what the result is.
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