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USA must push Arab leaders to confront IS: Clinton

Hillary Clinton delivered a speech today to the Council on Foreign Relations in NY.

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Donald Trump believes Hillary Clinton’s refusal to use the phrase “radical Islam” is evidence she’s playing nice with President Obama to escape punishment for her growing email scandal.

“It is time to begin a new phase and intensify and broaden our efforts to smash the would-be caliphate and deny ISIS control of territory in Iraq and Syria”, Clinton told attendees in a dark-wood paneled room on the Upper East Side.

“It would certainly grow, but I think it would be a mistake”, she said, noting her support for sending more USA special forces, empowering us trainers in Iraq and using an air coalition in the region. “This is a time for American leadership”.

Another key part of Clinton’s strategy is a no-fly zone over northern Syria, which she said Thursday would in part provide “safe refuge” for Syrians and stem the flow of refugees into other countries, including the U.S. But she stressed that a political solution is now the best option to resolving the country’s civil war amid the burgeoning momentum of the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS.

Recent polls indicate that Clinton holds a huge lead among SC Democrats over her main Democratic rival, Vermont Sen. If we have learned anything from 15 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s that local people and nations have to secure their own communities. We can help them, and we should but we cannot substitute for them.

Instead, she called on Arab nations to supply much of the military force on the ground.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) – Hillary Rodham Clinton is spending the coming weeks promoting a series of tax benefits that she says will help boost the take-home pay for middle class families.

On the Syrian refugees, Clinton said, “Turning away orphans, applying a religious test, discriminating against Muslims, slamming the door on every Syrian refugee-that is just not who we are”. “We need to have a resolve that will bring the world together to root out the kind of radical jihadist ideology that motivates organizations like ISIS, a barbaric, ruthless, violent jihadist group”. “Islam itself is not our adversary”, she insisted.

While parting ways with Obama to a few degree, she hewed closely to his decision to resettle as many as 10,000 Syrian refugees as part of the traditional USA welcoming role.

Her command of the subject matter sets her apart from numerous Republican candidates who still struggle to speak with confidence about foreign policy issues. “We should not stop pressing until Turkey, where most foreign fighters cross into Syria, finally locks down its border”. “It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country”, she said.

According to that story in The Guardian, she called for American troops to be embedded with Iraqi troops on front lines of the battles she envisions, and a notoriously hard no-fly zone to be imposed over Syria.

One senses that, if Clinton had not paid such a high political price for her support of the Iraq War in 2003, she might be sympathetic to such arguments. “I think that when you go to a formal declaration of war, you have to really understand who the enemy is, what you are trying to achieve against that enemy [and] what the resources you are going to need are”.

A day earlier, opposition Republican Party presidential candidate Jeb Bush spelled out his national security proposal at the Citadel in SC.

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Clinton’s comments come after the Obama administration announced that it was ending the $500 million program training and equipping moderate Syrian rebels in October, after it was ultimately deemed a failure.

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