CLINTON TOUGH ON IRAN - AT 6:55 A.M. ET:  The administration must get its act together on Iran (and on everything else).  Different voices are speaking, and often with different slants.  Secretary of State Clinton takes a tough line in an interview with, oddly enough, Venezuelan television.  Would she say the same thing to Fox News?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that Washington would call for more sanctions against Iran if the White House policy of engagement with Tehran failed.

Clinton said U.S. outreach to Iran may not work given the country's recent repression of protests after a disputed election.

"It may not be possible, in which case we would ask the world to join us in imposing even stricter sanctions on Iran to try to change the behavior of the regime," Clinton said in an interview with Venezuelan television station Globovision, broadcast late on Tuesday.  "We have seen in the last weeks that Iran has not respected its own democracy," she said.

COMMENT:  Okay, okay.  But, as Gen. Lauris Norstad, once commander of NATO, famously said, "Toughness is not a policy."  And so far, our Iran policy has had more drift than anything else.  The Obama administration will soon hit the six-month mark, and there really has been no serious action regarding Iran's nuclear program.  Yet, the centrifuges keep spinning, and Iran gets closer to the bomb.

The president has said, vaguely, that he'll give "engagement" until the end of the year to produce results.  Well, then what?  New sanctions, as Clinton is suggesting?  Who will agree to them?  Russia?  Are we serious?  China? 

The talking phase will soon be over.  The president's poll numbers are weakening, and one reason clearly is that he doesn't produce real results.

As we're written here before, it's going to be an interesting autumn.

July 8, 2009