How do you explain away Hillary Clinton’s assumed hawkishness?
Like this.
Everyone voted to invade Iraq. I remember, I was active in politics that year. I mentioned this fact in the article Libertarian hostility for Hillary Clinton. Either you were with Bush II or you were against him. Painting a target on your back is not how you get things done in a political sphere. It is how you get eliminated. She was a savvy operator then, and she is one now. A survivor. Someone who gets shit done. Someone who will make a good leader.
Obama let France take out Muammar Gaddafi like they wanted to do, and I don’t shed tears for dead dictators. They get what is coming to them. The same fate is waiting for Assad in Syria. You don’t destroy your country the way he has done over the last five years and walk away from that. Justice is waiting for him when this conflict ends.
If Hillary Clinton was a war hawk, she wouldn’t have worked to get a deal with Iran. Pacifists dismiss this fact because it destroys their narrative. However, all of these are the president’s policies; Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton. The President calls the shots, not the Secretary of State. That I happen to agree with them is beside the point. Those policies are his policies, not hers.
Let me frame the question of who Hillary Clinton really is with her own history. Her history as related in this piece contrasting her past with the past of the Orange Hate-Monkey;
Consider, for a moment, two people. One, as a young woman at the beginning of a promising legal career, went door to door searching for ways to guarantee an education to the countless disabled and disadvantaged children who had fallen through the cracks. The other, as a young millionaire, exacted revenge on his recently deceased brother’s family by cutting off the medical insurance desperately needed by his nephew’s newborn son, who at eighteen months of age was suffering from violent seizures brought on by a rare neurological disorder.
Now let’s talk about the future.
Daesh has to be destroyed. Daesh in all it’s forms, all across the world. no amount of wishing will make them go away. It is going to take killing. Also, we have an uppity Russian dictator who needs to be treated with a firm, sure hand. Those tiny hands the Orange Hate-Monkey has will not do the trick. It’s going to take someone who knows the ins and outs of diplomacy. Someone who has been on the scene for the last thirty years or so would be good.
“Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came”
Charlotte E. Keyes, Carl Sandburg
Much as I don’t like it, and I don’t, war must be met with war. Violence can
frequently only be countered with violence. I’ve protested every war that has occurred while I was breathing, but we need someone who can credibly hold the keys to the largest military machine in the world and be trusted not to blink. We need someone who is going to be able to do the job in front of her. That someone is Hillary Clinton. If we’re lucky.
Ideologues should stick to theorizing and stay out of real politics. They just screw up the real world for the rest of us. There is no panacea that will fix the world. War isn’t the answer. Peace isn’t the answer. Walking the path before us is going to take hard decisions. It requires someone who isn’t constrained by an ideology that keeps them from doing what they have to do. Whether that thing is taking the fight to a credible threat, or walking away from an unwinnable conflict. It takes someone willing to occupy the middle space. Like most things in life, it requires compromise.
