On edit: News reports are confusing on this...but it looks like at least the "back channel" part of the story is true.
Foreign policy debate...what, this week? Anyone old enough to remember the day remembers Gary Sick and Iran and October surprises...
October surprises suck when the neo-fascists do it...but apparently we have one ourselves, because theIran & the US have entered secret negotiations almost from the beginning of Obama's term for one-on-one nuclear disarmament talks.
And they've (not yet?)agreed to do it. After the election. Because they want to know with whom they're negotiating.
That means if "Bibi" that sick SOB torturing the people in the Gaza with the blockade does anything, he'll be totally rogue, totally alone, and left to twist in the wind.
Which means he won't do anything.
No matter how much anyone wants their bloodthirsty end-times poo-bah to return on the event of a mideast war, even a dork like "Bibi" is going to understand that he can't do Iran alone.
That they've been planning this for four years indicates to me that what Obama did was a strong parallel to what the Reagan folks with William Casey did - the neo-fascists tried to keep Iran from releasing the hostages giving Carter a foreign policy victory while Obama tried to keep Israel from attacking Iran...or tried to keep Iran from becoming an issue for the other side, to make the parallel more accurate.
Obama has an October surprise, that Romney doesn't have.
This means going into that foreign policy debate, Romney at this point has his member in his hand, and that's about it.