“A ground campaign in Iraq will only succeed if more Iraqi Sunnis join the fight”, she said.
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“We should get this done”, Mrs. Clinton said in a detailed speech delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations in NY on Thursday.
For instance, while Clinton called for a USA effort to support Arab armies on the ground to rout ISIS, she did not explain exactly how that would happen.
But, she added, the US needs to “be prepared to deploy more” special operations forces than Obama has authorized so far and give USA troops now in Iraq more leeway to embed with Iraqi units engaged in combat.
“Islam is not our adversary”, she argued earlier in the speech.
Instead, Clinton ramped up the pressure on the governments of Iraq and of Turkey to put aside their old grievances by saying that there was not time to wait on this ISIS threat.
She said Qatar and Saudi Arabia “need to stop their citizens from directly funding extremist organizations”.
While a few of the details differed, most notably on the role of US ground forces, the plans of both candidates are grounded in a belief the next president must be more aggressive than the current one in order to defeat the Islamic State group.
She didn’t say how she would get Middle East rulers to budge more than they have, though, and said nothing of Gulf countries.
The president also said: “They no more represent Islam than any madman who kills in the name of Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism”. Turning away orphans, applying a religious test, discriminating against Muslims, slamming the door on every Syrian refugee – that is just not who we are. She was also specific about a no-fly zone for northern Syria to cut off supply lines of resources and foreign fighters to Isis.
Hillary Clinton after her foreign policy speech on Thursday.
Clinton is the Democratic front-runner. Look, as I said, we should be sending more special operators.
Hillary can’t whitewash her record with tough talk.
I was very proud to serve as President Obama’s secretary of state.
Whether the original schedule was created to favor front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton is no longer an issue.
While party officials and backers of both campaigns are predicting a robust primary, the chances of that happening are pretty slim, said Bruce Oppenheimer, a Vanderbilt University political scientist who studies elections.
Clinton praised Obama in February, saying that “a lot of the right moves are being made”.
Also on Saturday, Clinton-despite her vows to tackle Wall Street-reiterated her opposition to the Glass Steagall Act, which was repealed by her husband in 1999 and would break up big banks by splitting investment and commercial banking.
She underscored that position again Thursday.
Clinton’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, two GOP 2016 hopefuls who have said the United States should focus on helping Syrian Christians first. “We hope to do Daesh much faster than that and we think we have an ability to do that”, he said.
“ISIS is demonstrating new ambition, reach, and capabilities”, Clinton said.
Later, in a question-and-answer session with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Clinton seemed to affirm that the number-one priority is taking out ISIS rather than removing Assad from power.
Then-New York senator Clinton in 2002 supported George W. Bush’s push for war.
Secretary Clinton also addressed the debate over Syrian refugees coming into the US and the potential threat to homeland security.
“So I think there has been an evolution in their threat, and we have to meet it”.
Other Republicans have also called for more force, CBS2’s Dick Brennan reported.
This is a time for American leadership.
Clinton’s proposal still doesn’t include combat boots on the ground, as a few Republican presidential nominees have proposed.
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The lead Democratic presidential candidate outlined a three-pronged strategy to defeat ISIS, disrupt and dismantle the infrastructure that facilitates the flow of arms, fighters and propaganda across the world, and to bolster global defences against radical jihadism.
