Clinton doesn’t distance herself from Obama in ISIS speech

“Therefore we must choose resolve”. “The entire world must be part of this fight, but we must lead it”.

Clinton talked about ways the USA could be more aggressive with ISIS online in a speech Thursday. “Our goal is not to deter or contain ISIS, but to defeat and destroy ISIS”, she said, in an implicit criticism of President Barack Obama as being too tepid on military intervention-and a signal that she intends to tack far to his right.

“Madam Secretary, if the only way you can put together a moderate Syrian force is by having the United States cajole, bribe, arm and train it, we are then looking for this force to defeat ISIS, then defeat Assad, then defeat al- Nusra, then defeat other Al Qaida affiliates, keep at bay the Shiite militias and Hezbollah, take control of Damascus and establish a pluralistic democracy in Syria”. “And we should be honest about the fact that to be successful, air strikes will have to be combined with ground forces actually taking back more territory from ISIS”.

The second prong of her plan goes off the rails.

But even as she has embraced Obama’s domestic policy achievements – a popular move in the Democratic nominating contest – his foreign policy record has become more complicated to address.

Also, a foreign donor controversy lends questions as to how autonomous President Clinton will be pertaining to foreign policy decisions.

“Hillary Clinton calls for getting tougher on the Islamic State, while parroting her old boss” take-in-the-refugees bromides.

But Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state, might not exactly agree.

Huffington Post correspondent Jonathan Cohn recently noted that Clinton appears to have intensified her tactic of attacking Sanders at the Democratic debate on Saturday.

But Clinton made clear she did not want to send in more ground troops.

Pulling ISIS accounts on social media will hinder intelligence-gathering, which runs counter to Clinton’s insistence that the USA needs better information-gathering on its enemies.

She rebuked Saudi Arabia for not stopping its citizens funding extremist groups and chided Europe for not sharing intelligence on extremists.

She also warned that the encryption that technology firms such as Apple have embraced for mobile phones and other devices may be interfering with the government’s ability to prevent terrorist attacks. Look, as I said, we should be sending more special operators.

Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, Friday, …

“No, I am not a pacifist”.

If there is one thing we have learned over the past 15 years of war, it is that we need a serious force to support local allies. She did, after all, serve in an administration that is now being accused of ignoring the building threat of ISIS, of allowing Syria to implode with the loss of more than 250,000 lives and of engineering a retreat from the world that let extremism prosper.

Indeed, the RNC wasted little time in calling Clinton “the architect of the failed Obama foreign policy” who has “largely doubled down on the existing Obama strategy”.

Sen. Sanders’ campaign responded by claiming Ms. Clinton was intentionally misleading people to distract attention from her connections to Wall Street.

And despite her lead in the polls, Clinton has not won the Democratic nomination yet, and accordingly framed her differences with Obama carefully as she courts dovish Democrats. The conflict with the Islamic State “requires sustained commitment from every pillar of American power”, she said. “He just said ‘radical Islam.’ Is that a phrase you don’t -?” “We are better than that”. If you really don’t like Hillary Clinton then support Martin O’Malley.

Many Republican candidates and more than two dozen state governors have called for a pause in the resettlement program out of fears militants might sneak into the country.

Her speech came a day after Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said more US ground forces will be needed in Iraq in the wake of the Paris attacks. “We can’t outsource this”.