Can’t find a link with specific quotes of Albright threatening military action to curtail India’s nuclear ambitions. However, this article by Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute is a great description of the Clintonistas’ attempts to establish a US-Chinese condominium to dictate the terms of India’s nuclear destiny.

Attributing New Delhi’s decision to conduct nuclear tests and move toward “weaponizing” its atomic program solely to the evolving U.S.-Chinese relationship is an oversimplification. The five-decade-old feud with Pakistan, as well as domestic politics, clearly played a role. Nevertheless, Indian officials and opinion leaders vehemently stressed not only the alleged security threat posed by China but Washington’s apparent tilt toward Beijing. India’s defense minister, George Fernandes, reacted bluntly to U.S. criticism of the tests. “I would ask Bill Clinton only one question. And it would be this: Why is it that you feel yourself so close to China that you can trust China with nuclear weapons ellipse but you cannot trust India?” The strategy editor of The Hindu newspaper reflected the same sense of irritation and betrayal: “We were being told to stay in a small box while the U.S. gave South Asia to China.” Even a prominent critic of the tests, former Prime Minister I. K. Gujral, asked, “If you have decided that this side of Suez is an area of influence of China, what should an Indian policymaker do?” American officials further alienated the Indian government by contemptuously dismissing protests about growing U.S.-Chinese ties. The scorn over Delhi’s objections to Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s joint declaration in June pledging cooperation to stem nuclear weapon and ballistic missile proliferation and promote peace and stability in South Asia was typical. The Indian government noted that it was “ironical that two countries that have directly and indirectly contributed to the unabated proliferation of nuclear weapons and delivery systems in our neighborhood are presuming to prescribe the norms for nonproliferation.” Such rebukes understandably irked Clinton and Albright, but Albright’s reaction betrayed a complete unwillingness to accord Delhi’s concerns even a modicum of respect. She accused the Indians of acting as though a call for a halt to proliferation “doesn’t apply to them, that everybody is out of step with them.” She added ominously, “They had better stop dismissing statements like this.” The secretary acted as if India had no right to object to a coordinated U.S.-Chinese policy on key issues — including Kashmir — in India’s backyard. From India’s perspective, the declaration looked like the product of a U.S.-Chinese condominium to dictate outcomes in South Asia. No major power could accept such a development placidly. Indeed, Washington’s insensitivity may intensify, rather than reduce, Delhi’s determination to build a nuclear deterrent and adopt a more assertive foreign policy.

As for Democrat legislators dragging their feet on the nuclear deal… one need look no further than the voting record for HR 5682, the Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act.

Govtrack

In the House of Representatives, the Republicans voted in favor of the act 219 to 9. The Democrats were markedly less enthusiastic, with 140 voting in favor and 58 against. Most telling, though, were the amendments that Democrat after Democrat introduced with the clear intention of sabotaging the act. See Rediff for details. Note especially the amendments introduced by Brad Sherman and Howard Berman (both D-CA)… which would have completely contravened the intent of the July 18th, 2005 joint declaration on which the whole exercise was predicated, and the 123 agreement whose terms Nicholas Burns had been negotiating in good faith with his counterparts in South Block.

In the US Senate the divide along party lines was even more emphatic, with all 12 senators voting against the bill’s passage being Democrats.

Some of the Democratic Senators who opposed the Hyde Act have very obvious China connections. Others, perhaps not so obvious… but let’s remember, we’re talking about a Democratic Party that is known to have been penetrated by Beijing’s influence at the highest levels. Remember the 1996 Campaign Finance revelations… when Bill Clinton was reported to have received nearly half-a-million dollars for his legal defense fund from PRC government representative Charlie Trie? The Chinese haven’t been as brazen or egregious in their patronage of the Democratic Party in the years since then. However, I can’t think of a likelier explanation for all those Democratic legislators’ opposition to the India-US Nuclear Deal, other than that they’re firmly ensconced in Beijing’s pocket.

I lost you after the D-Punjab thingie (which is one of the reasons I have never warmed up to Obama, that plus the Austan Goolsbee episode).

Do you have any citations for all your “facts” about Madeleine Albright, and the Dem Senators dragging their feet? The discriminatory NPT regime was put in place by both Democrats and Republicans collaborating with each other (and the remaining P-5 nations). Plus I don’t know if you remember one of the most anti India congressmen has been Rep. Dan Burton from Indiana (5th) is a Republican. Take a look at http://www.google.com/search?q=“dan+burton”+india

Interestingly he does support the N-deal. He seems to have moderated his earlier Anti-India stance though.

On the one hand, Mr. Obama spares no opportunity to portray himself as the black victim of right-wing Republican racism– a role he has perfected. His Harvard erudition melts away into a plaintive inner-city mumble as he tells us how the McCain campaign is trying to make everybody afraid of him. Of how they point out that he doesn’t look like the Presidents on the money… you know.

On the other hand, and far removed from the media glare, there’s the Obama campaign’s calculated use of racial slurs when he knows most people aren’t looking, or listening.

During the deliberate, targeted campaign of character assassination mounted against Hillary Clinton by the Obama people earlier this year… one specific smear stands out in the minds of Indian Americans, because it fed on the kind of xenophobia that is increasingly directed towards us in this time of immigration and outsourcing debates.

A fund-raiser and supporter of Senator Clinton’s named Sant Chatwal became the specific object of the Obama people’s hate campaign. Mr. Chatwal is a successful hotelier in the tri-state area, and a long-time associate of Senator Clinton’s. He is a proud American– of Sikh Indian ancestry, but no less an American for having those roots.

Trying to capitalize on the morbid and all-pervasive fear of outsourcing to India… which appears increasingly the Democratic Party’s favorite scapegoat for America’s economic woes… the Obama people smeared Senator Clinton for her association with Mr. Chatwal by putting out a carefully-unsigned press release referring to her as THE SENATOR FROM PUNJAB.

For one thing, this was completely and utterly racist… Mr Chatwal has only about as much connection with Punjab as Mr. Obama has with Kenya, though of course if you dwell too long on Mr. Obama’s Kenyan roots his attack dogs will be all over you with accusations of racism.

For another, it was intentionally misleading… worded in such a way as to suggest that Mrs. Clinton was somehow in favor of outsourcing to India, or looking out for a foreign country’s interests at the expense of America’s own, and connecting this allegation to the fact that her supporter Mr. Chatwal happens to be of Indian origin.

And finally, it capitalized on exactly the kind of toxic, widespread prejudice that Mr. Obama blames the McCain campaign of deploying against him. Mr. Obama contends that the Republicans are using “dog-whistle politics” to infuse majority white voters with fear about how different he is from them and from the image of their traditional leaders. Yet, his campaign tried to smear Mrs. Clinton using a loathesome and xenophobic popular stereotype of ethnic Indians as a strange brown-skinned people who threaten the American economy by outsourcing American jobs. With the specific use of the phrase “Senator from Punjab” to smear Mrs. Clinton, the Obama people slip in a cheap-shot implication of extra-national loyalty that’s completely unfair to both Sant Chatwal, a proud American citizen, and to Hillary Clinton whom he supports.

Mr. Obama has demonstrated that if you’re an American who accumulates enough wealth and power, you are free to be as blatantly, vicariously, publicly racist as you like… as long as you don’t happen to be white. It also helps to have a lick-spittle media that considers you beyond reproach, and refuses to look at the sorts of ugly things that are going on.

We all know the kind of outrage that would have abounded, had Republican criticism of Mr. Obama’s shadier associates, like the convicted felon Mr. Rezko and the curiously radical pastor Jeremiah Wright, referred at all to the ethnicity of those two worthy gentlemen. Yet, when Mr. Obama’s people want to cast the nastiest, most xenophobic aspersions on one of Mrs. Clinton’s associates… Sant Chatwal… apparently the same definition of what constitutes racism does not apply.

As for Obama’s running mate, Senator Joe Biden obviously has utter contempt for the Indian American community’s sentiments. Why else would he choose to make a punchline out of the repugnant cartoon stereotype of Indians as heavily accented 7-11 owners, and feel comfortable doing so in front of C-SPAN’s cameras?

I’d strongly urge my fellow Indian-Americans to consider this, when making up their minds on whom to vote for this November.

We as a community have always tended to vote Democrat, perhaps having swallowed the oft-repeated lie that Democrats stand up for the rights of ethnic minorities more conscientiously than do Republicans. On even cursory examination, though, it becomes obvious that this only applies to minorities who are large enough to significantly impact the electoral calculus.

The anti-India prejudice of the Democratic Party, which exists in plain sight if you only take a moment to look, isn’t restricted to a slight here or a gaffe there. Whether it stems from the all-pervasive Chinese sponsorship of Democratic legislators and administration officials, or from plain old institutionalized bigotry, the fact remains that it’s reflected at the highest levels of their policymaking.

Consider the right of India, menaced by two hostile and nuclear-armed neighbors in China and Pakistan, to develop the necessary means to defend herself. India’s attempt to establish a nuclear deterrent against the threat posed by these neighbors, was met with rabid hostility from the Democratic Clinton administration. Not only were all manner of economic and technological sanctions applied, but Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright actually advocated taking military action against India for her arrogance in having tested nuclear weapons.

This Democratic policy was based on the blatantly supremacist idea that lesser nations and peoples must be denied what is now sixty-year-old technology by means of intimidation and bullying. The devices of its enforcement, such as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, may reasonably be compared to a law that prohibits American citizens from owning guns unless they happen to be white and live in rich neighborhoods.

Imposing sanctions on New Delhi after India’s nuclear tests didn’t serve American interests in any conceivable way. They did not persuade India to give up her nuclear weapons program, nor did they significantly slow India’s emergence as an economic power. All they achieved was to alienate a potential ally and burgeoning export market for the better part of a decade… at more long-term cost to America’s interests than to India’s.

By contrast, the Bush administration… reviled at every turn for its aggressive implementation of foreign policy… was actually sensitive to India’s security concerns. Yes, this monstrous Republican regime was the one that not only lifted the Clinton sanctions, but went out of its way to ensure that India could claim her rightful place in the comity of responsible nuclear-armed states by introducing the Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006. The Republicans didn’t just talk about deepening the natural alliance for which such great promise exists between India and the United States; they threw America’s diplomatic weight behind the agreement at the IAEA and the NSG. Throughout the international community, they expended whatever political capital was necessary to see the deal through.

And the Democrats? Well, when the Indo-US Nuclear Cooperation Agreement came up for vote in Congress as H.R. 5682, it was a host of Democratic legislators… including Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Barbara Boxer, who did their best to scuttle the deal. At every opportunity, they introduced poison pill amendments that would have killed the agreement negotiated in good faith between the State Department and the Indian Government. Obviously, for all their voluble concern about “global warming”, the Democrats are eager to deny India the use of clean nuclear power for her rapidly growing economy. Obviously, for all their supposed commitment to egalitarianism, they’re happy to see communist China threaten democratic India with nuclear weapons but begrudge India the capacity to retaliate.

I wonder if this reflects the paternalist worldview that the Democratic Party seems to have inherited directly from the old British Empire… that a nation of brown people can neither be trusted nor allowed to possess dangerous weapons. It’s ironic that the party promoting such an atavistic, racist and inflexible foreign policy should claim to stand for “change”. Their perspective could not be more different from the hard realism and courageous initiative that the Bush administration has demonstrated in dealing with India as an emerging power in her own right.

Perhaps this difference in attitudes towards India is also reflected in President Bush taking time out of his schedule to drop in on a meeting between then NSA Condoleezza Rice and India’s Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh, in Washington DC some years ago. During that same visit, Mr. Singh was kept waiting for hours and then blown off by the office of Senator Joe Biden. Chew on that the next time you stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts.

What?! Libertarianism is more publicly popular than its been in years. Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul! I’m sad that the Democratic Party isn’t more amenable to it, but what can you do? American partisan politics sucks

I actually did used to refer to myself as a NeoCon before I realized I was a lot more libertarian than I thought, now I say that I’m a Goldwater Republican…but since that is almost extinct, I think I’m just confused and but that is just an Indian thing.

A lot of Muslims are Social Conservatives, as much or more so than the majority of Jews. Just like all these Muslims cannot be termed “Jihadi”, all the Jews cannot be called “Zionist”. Especially when in this context and her previous use and implications of the terms, “NeoCon” and “Zionist” are supposd to be I read it as war mongering, Palestine hating, Muslim baiting, racists. Alright, even if we do take that definition of “Necon – Zionists” acceptable…is there a nuanced corrolary to the assumption that it was “Hindu-Indians” who associated with them at the RNC?

An example of this was at an urban warfare simulation during training last year. We took turns in playing Joes and bogeys; in one of the rooms, after we had “taken out” the bogeys, we were supposed to secure them for interrogation. During that, one of the guys called the captured bogey a “Hajee” and our Sergeant snapped at us and said we could never use that term as it was offensive. I asked him later why he had said that, because from my knowledge “Hajee” was a honorific and he explained it to me…

You have got to stop using “Zionist” and “NeoCon” or equivalent polarizing terms, not everyone who disagrees with you represents a fanatical fringe…on that note, many who agree with you might…how’s that for stereotyping?

sure, i’m all for dropping casual usage–especially ‘neocon.’ I will continue, however, to call a Jabotinsky a Jabotinsky and an Iron Wall an Iron Wall…

17 · Nesha on September 3, 2008 01:09 PM · Direct link · “Quote”(?) It is important, I think, to not categorize this as a general love fest between Jews and Indians. I would venture a strong guess that the Indians at the RNC aligning with Right-wing Jews were mostly, if not all, Hindus. Most Jews in America are Democrats, and the ones aligning themselves with Republicans, are like Lieberman, hardcore Zionists or neocons.

Not all Jews who support Republicans are Neocons or Zionists and not all Hindus are Lotus Lovers; just like not all blacks who support them are Uncle Toms. Lets not start stereotyping here…neither of the Sununus are Zionist or Hindus, check their voting records.

Lieberman of all is maybe a Neocon and not a Zionist, I have no love lost for him and felt that his speech was about as inspiring as all of Mitt’s head bobs put together. But to harp on him will only lead me to point out that thanks to him, a large portion of Arab Americans did not vote for Gore just because a Jewish man was on the ticket…

You have got to stop using “Zionist” and “NeoCon” or equivalent polarizing terms, not everyone who disagrees with you represents a fanatical fringe…on that note, many who agree with you might…how’s that for stereotyping?