excuse me

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But is this Lavrov's way of gently stating Hillary is being a little optimistic about Russian support for these sanctions she's so meatily bragging about? What will I find when I look for what China has to say? Brazil and Turkey are none too pleased.
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I get bubkes, except that it appears this draft she's bragging about has a bunch of non-binding provisions in it and some people are antsy about trying to make it any stronger, or the U.S. trying to unilaterally carry it further.

I don't know what the hell is going on. I think last time I looked we were going to have to water down our proposed tough new set of sanctions against Iran considerably before we could get more than a "maybe later" out of Russia and a "maybe much later" from China. So I'm assuming that's the drill. Hillary watered them down to nothing much and not binding in exchange for being able to say she has their backing, but they're looking snake-eyed at her, lest she get over zealous. I think that's the thing, because I think they're with everyone else in liking the Turkey and Brazil deal.

This is so mortifying.
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Russia-US-China-Iran: Russian authorities refused to confirm or deny a statement by the US Secretary of State that Russia backed new sanctions against Iran.

A Chinese official statement clarified that new sanctions would not interfere with legitimate trade, implying China backed some form of new sanctions, as stated by the Secretary.

So, right, she got them to agree to watered down and non-binding sanctions, and they aren't going to humiliate her unless she gets too awful.

At last count, Iran was completely onboard with the IAEA thing, not breaching ANY nonproliferation treaty obligations, only not having ratified some add-on that didn't really make any difference... not so much as a toenail paring over the line... and we're just screaming crazy stuff, trying to bully our way into not sounding insane, because we CAN. Has that changed? I don't think so. I think one of my sources would have mentioned that by now.
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So, anyway, I'm glad I didn't go berserk, thinking China and Russia had REALLY suddenly decided to hop aboard the Love Boat, here, only some fantastic space weapon or psychic death ray—or Ahmadinejad unveiling a shiny new nuke—maybe not even that—being all that could have explained this to me. I just had a momentary fit, batted it off and came back to look where any sense could be made of it this evening.

Semi-Zen.
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