Scarlet Woman Prepares For Fight Against ISIS (Revelation 17:4)

Hillary Clinton to Lay Out Strategy Against Islamic State

Laura Meckler

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for president, is laying out her strategy for defeating Islamic State and dismantling the growing terrorist infrastructure in a speech Thursday aimed at better defining her approach to what has become an acute foreign-policy challenge.

Her speech, at the Council on Foreign Relations less than a week after a deadly, devastating attack in Paris, will lay out “her strategy for countering ISIS and for the longer-term struggle to combat radical jihadism across the globe,” a Clinton aide said, previewing her remarks.

Ahead of the speech, the aide offered no detail on how she would go about this other than to name her “overarching objectives.” He said she aims to defeat ISIS in Syria, Iraq and across the region; to “disrupt and dismantle the growing terrorist infrastructure” that facilitates the flow of fighters, money, arms and propaganda; and harden defenses in the U.S. and allied countries against both external and homegrown threats.

A somewhat more revealing preview may have come on Tuesday from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, who told a meeting of the Wall Street Journal CEO Council that she would employ a multipronged strategy to defeat Islamic State.

Mr. Podesta said that would include accelerated use of air power against their targets and supporting and equipping fighters on the ground, particularly the Kurds and Arabs fighting them in both northern Iraq and Syria. And he said Mrs. Clinton would work to get regional partners to take on a more robust role.

“We’ve got to get our Arab and Muslim partners more in the game, particularly the Saudis and the Turks, to take the fight to them,” he said.

Mr. Podesta reiterated a point that Mrs. Clinton made in Saturday’s Democratic debate—that her goal would be to defeat Islamic State, a contrast with recent comments from President Barack Obama, who said in an interview ahead of the Paris attack that the group had been contained.

“These are barbaric, nihilistic jihadis,” Mr. Podesta said. “They have to be defeated. They can’t be contained.”

Observers will be watching the Clinton speech to see how closely she hues to Mr. Obama’s policy, and where she breaks, a particularly sensitive question given that she served as his secretary of state for four years. She’s already suggested a more muscular U.S. role in the conflict, including arming the moderate opposition in Syria when she was secretary of state, and more recently advocating for a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone.

The White House has rejected a no-fly zone as a resource-intensive investment that could put the U.S. on a slippery slope toward a wider war.

Mrs. Clinton may also articulate what role she sees Russia playing at a time when the Obama administration has suggested a coalition of sorts with Moscow if it changes its orientation in Syria toward defeating Islamic State, from propping up President Bashar al-Assad.

The Clinton speech comes a day after Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, gave his own speech on Islamic State, where he called for a broad U.S. military buildup designed to defeat the terrorist group and “develop the capability to wage war with crushing force.” He called for 40,000 new Army troops, 4,000 more Marines and new submarines and aircraft.

The Scarlet Woman Shows Her True Colors (Rev 17:4)

 
Clinton didn’t learn from Iraq

First Posted: 11:28 am – October 28th, 2015 – 264 Views
Medea Benjamin – Contributing Columnist

As the first Democratic presidential debate drew to a close, moderator Anderson Cooper posed a question to Hillary Clinton: How might her presidency differ from Barack Obama’s?

Clinton smiled. “Well, I think it’s pretty obvious,” she replied to rapturous applause. “Being the first woman president would be quite a change from the presidents we’ve had.”

Indeed, a Hillary Clinton presidency would shatter the glass ceiling for women in the United States. But it would also leave intact the old boys’ military-industrial complex that’s kept our nation in a perpetual state of war for decades.

Clinton, it seems, failed to learn anything after supporting the disastrous Iraq War, which plunged a huge swath of the Middle East into chaos and cost her the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. Instead of embracing diplomacy, she continued to champion ill-conceived military interventions as secretary of state.

In 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Libya, Clinton was the Obama administration’s most forceful advocate for intervening to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. She even out-hawked Robert Gates, the Pentagon chief first appointed by George W. Bush who was less than enthusiastic about going to war in Libya.

Ironically, the political grief Clinton has suffered over the subsequent attack on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, which killed four Americans, might never have occurred if Clinton had opted against intervening in Libya’s civil war.

While House Republicans recently spent 11 hours relentlessly drilling Clinton about Benghazi and her personal email account, the larger disaster by far is the postwar chaos that’s left Libya without a functioning government, overrun by feuding warlords and extremist militants.

Clinton favors greater military intervention in Syria’s civil war, too. In her presidential bid, she’s joined hawkish Republican senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham in supporting the creation of a no-fly zone over the country.

That puts her at odds not only with President Barack Obama, but also with her Democratic presidential rival Bernie Sanders, who warned that it could “get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region.”

Clinton did end up supporting the administration’s Iran nuclear deal, but her support came with a history of bellicose baggage.

Back in 2008, for example, she warned that Washington could “totally obliterate“ Iran. During that presidential campaign, she chided Obama as “naïve” and “irresponsible” for wanting to engage the country diplomatically.

Even after the nuclear agreement was sealed, she struck a bullying tone: “I don’t believe Iran is our partner in this agreement,” Clinton insisted. “Iran is the subject of the agreement.” She added that she “won’t hesitate to take military action” if it falls through.

Contrast Clinton with the more moderate Secretary of State John Kerry. It’s no wonder Obama’s two signature foreign policy achievements — the Iran deal and the groundbreaking opening of diplomatic ties with Cuba — came after Clinton left.

There was a very telling moment about Clinton’s attitude during the debate when Cooper asked, “Which enemy are you most proud of?”

Alongside the NRA, Republicans, and health insurance companies, Clinton listed “the Iranians” — which could mean either the Iranian government or the nation’s 78 million people. In either case, it wasn’t a very diplomatic thing to say while her successor and former colleagues are trying to chart a new, more cooperative relationship with Iran.

When it comes to war and peace, it might not matter too much if a Republican or Hillary Clinton wins the White House. In either case, the winner will be the military-industrial complex President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about.

An Odd Statement From The Scarlet Woman (Revelation 17:4)

 
Hillary Clinton: death penalty used ‘too frequently’ in the US

Lauren Gambino in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Ed Pilkington in New York
Wednesday 28 October 2015 17.42 EDT

Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton does not support abolishing the death penalty, but questioned the frequency with which it is applied.

At a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Clinton said the federal government needs to take a “hard look” at capital punishment, which she said has been “too frequently applied” in an “indiscriminate way”.

“I do not favor abolishing however, because I think there are certain egregious [cases] that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty,” Clinton said in Manchester on Wednesday.
Clinton qualified her support of the death penalty by explaining that it should be used only in “very limited and rare” circumstances.

“We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied and very, unfortunately, often times in a discriminatory way,” Clinton said.

Her remarks on the death penalty, though cautiously phrased, amount to a rare foray by Clinton into a subject that she has generally sidestepped. In 1976, as a young lawyer in Arkansas, she was part of a team that successfully fought to keep an intellectually disabled person, Henry Giles, from the death chamber.

Her passionate stance against execution in that case contrasted strongly with that of her husband Bill Clinton, who boosted his tough-on-crime credentials in the 1992 presidential election by refusing to grant clemency to a condemned man, Rickey Ray Rector.

Hillary Clinton’s own views have been hard to pin down in recent years given her prolonged silence on the issue. In her bid for the New York seat in the US Senate in 2000, she said that she gave her “unenthusiastic support” to capital punishment – a hedged position similar to the one she expressed on Wednesday that did not please the liberal wing of the Democratic party.

Clinton’s latest comments come against the backdrop of a nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs, the result of a European-led boycott, that has refreshed the debate over the death penalty and raised important constitutional questions about what constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment”.
The scarcity of lethal drugs has forced states to scramble to obtain alternatives, leading several states to resort to using untested cocktails as a means of executing condemned prisoners.

She also noted that several states are “beginning to pull back from either applying the death penalty or narrowing the scope of the cases where it can be applied”.

“I think we have to be smarter and more careful about how we do it,” Clinton said.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination for president are both opposed to the death penalty. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s closest challenger in the race, has said he is strongly opposed to the death penalty.

In response to Clinton’s remarks on Wednesday, Martin O’Malley said capital punishment is “fundamentally at odds with our values”.

“The death penalty is racially biased, ineffective deterrent to crime, and we must abolish it,” said O’Malley, who as governor of Maryland abolished the death penalty in the state in 2013. “Our nation should not be in the company of Iran, Iraq, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Yemen in carrying out the majority of public executions.”

Scarlet Woman Gains Serious Momentum After Hearing (Rev 17)

Even conservatives admit the Benghazi hearing was a win for Hillary Clinton

BY KIMBERLY TRUONG

After withstanding 11 grueling hours of questioning by the House Select Committee on Benghazi on her role in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy there, Hillary Clinton is receiving extensive praise — including from some conservatives.

Reactions to the hearing range from commending Clinton’s poise to marveling at how she came out relatively unscathed. Albeit begrudgingly, those on the right, too, are admitting that Clinton came out on top.

In fact, many conservative figures joined in on the common refrain — Clinton showed resolve while Republicans on the panel were distracted, fighting with each other.

“In terms of the narrative on Benghazi, there was no major new development that rocked her side of the story, that changes this in some way,” said Ed Henry of Fox News. “What you have here is another big test for Hillary Clinton, and another big test that she appears to have passed.”

The Washington Examiner’s Byron York more or less agreed — “a hearing billed as an epic, High Noon-style confrontation,” he says, “instead turned out to be a somewhat interesting look at a few limited aspects of the Benghazi affair. In other words, no big deal. And that is very, very good news for Hillary Clinton.”

Ashe Schow, also of the Washington Examiner, chimed in with a piece for Observer News titled, “Sorry, Republicans, Clinton Won the Benghazi Hearing.”

“Republicans had one last great chance to get some answers from the former secretary of state, and they failed,” she wrote.

Several also lamented that the hearings were, as RedState’s Erick Erickson said, “a waste of time.”
“Most of the rest of the committee just wants to grandstand for the folks back home as either prosecutors of or defenders of Hillary Clinton,” he wrote. “Mrs. Clinton too is far too bright to be trapped in this or any questions.”

Even Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, acknowledged that the hearings yielded nothing new.

When asked by reporters what details emerged from the 11 hours of questioning, Gowdy said, “I think some of Jimmy Jordan’s questioning — well, when you say new today, we knew some of that already. We knew about the emails.”

“In terms of her testimony? I don’t know that she testified that much differently today than she has the previous time she testified.”

As for Clinton’s supporters, donor Pamela Eakes told the Associated Press: “We’re grateful to Republicans for giving her the best week ever.”

The Scarlet Woman Looking Presidential Even At Hearing (Rev 17:4)

Analysis: Clinton seeks to look presidential in hearing

By JULIE PACE

AP White House CorrespondentWASHINGTON (AP) – With a calm demeanor and detailed answers, Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to turn an hours-long congressional grilling on the deadly Benghazi attacks into an opportunity to look more presidential than political.
Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic nomination, used her opening remarks Thursday to urge lawmakers to “reach for statesmanship” and rise above partisanship. When asked by a friendly lawmaker how it felt to be accused of contributing to the deaths of four Americans, she spoke in a soft tone about the emotional toll of the 2012 attacks.

“I imagine I’ve thought more about what happened than all of you put together,” Clinton said. “I’ve lost more sleep than all of you put together.”

And when the committee’s Republican chairman and top Democratic member heatedly argued about making public the panel’s earlier private hearings, Clinton sat back with an amused smile on her face for several minutes. She appeared more than happy to stay out of a partisan spat that seemed to bolster her campaign’s contention that the hearing was more about politics than uncovering new information about the violence in Libya.

Clinton was largely unflappable through more than five hours of testimony that stretched into Thursday evening.

For Clinton, the hearing in the cavernous House committee room was a setting that played to her strengths. She’s long been more comfortable delving into detailed policy discussions than giving lofty speeches or engaging in other trappings of political campaigns. And she’s often been at her best when she has an opponent with whom to draw a contrast – in this case, a Republican-led committee.

To be sure, Clinton was sharply challenged by GOP lawmakers on a range of issues, from requests for additional security at the Benghazi compound that went unfulfilled to her frequent email exchanges about Libya with Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton friend who had no role at the State Department.

Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan also revived questions about the Obama administration’s shifting accounts of what happened at the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi and nearby CIA compound, positing that the White House was eager to avoid political damage from a terror attack less than two months before President Barack Obama faced re-election.

“I’m sorry it doesn’t fit your narrative, congressman,” Clinton said in response. “I can only tell you what the facts are.”

Clinton’s daylong testimony was unlikely to end Republicans’ quest to use the heavily scrutinized Benghazi attack to question her judgment and leadership. Revelations that Clinton relied on personal email and a private Internet server during her tenure at the State Department have only heightened the GOP’s interest in determining whether more information exists about the attack that killed Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans.

Clinton’s competent performance was also unlikely to drastically affect her standing in the Democratic race, where she faces a challenge from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Nearly half of Democrats and a majority of independents said they don’t have strong feelings about the Benghazi investigation, according to a new AP-GfK poll.

Still, emerging from the hearing largely unscathed will likely contribute to a sense of momentum around Clinton’s presidential bid. After an uneven start to her campaign that sparked anxiety among some Democrats, Clinton rebounded with a strong debate performance earlier this month. On Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden announced he wouldn’t make a late entry into the race and challenge Clinton for nomination.

Clinton’s advisers has long viewed the Benghazi hearing as a key hurdle as they seek to steady her campaign ahead of early voting contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign’s expectations for the hearing only increased after Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the No. 2 Republican in the House, said the committee had hurt Clinton’s poll numbers, helping bolster Democrats’ contention that the Benghazi investigations were motivated by politics.

Clinton’s team also saw the hearing as an opportunity to present herself as a seasoned diplomat and harken back to her days in the State Department, when her popularity soared and she won accolades from some of the Republicans now running against her in the White House contest.

She ticked through details of the administration’s policy toward Libya, where the U.S. invested significant resources to help rebels remove longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi from power. And she described numerous urgent conversations with the White House and CIA the night of the Benghazi attack.

Throughout her testimony, Clinton was slipped notes from longtime aide Cheryl Mills, prompting Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., to say he could pause his questioning so she could read the messages.

Appearing to find Roskam’s offer condescending, Clinton replied coolly, “I can do more than one thing at a time.”

__

Julie Pace has covered the White House and politics for The Associated Press since 2009. Follow her at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Scarlet Woman Will Depose Of EX (Revelation 17:4)

Hillary Clinton not sure if Bill Clinton would get West Wing office

BY BEN KAMISAR

Hillary Clinton isn’t sure if former President Clinton would have an office in the West Wing if she is elected president.

“He’s a pretty busy guy, I don’t know anything like that,” Hillary Clinton said after MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked her what role Bill Clinton might play on her team.

“I’m not counting my chickens before they hatch. I just want to be sure that we get the chance to earn the votes of the American people and to win the White House back,” the front-runner for the Democratic nomination said in response to a question about Bill Clinton having a West Wing office.
In the interview airing on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily,” Clinton lauded her husband as a “great adviser” who “knows as much about the economy and how to get jobs created and how to help people see their incomes rise as anybody that I could talk to.”

But she wouldn’t elaborate on the role that the former president would have in her potential administration.

The first lady typically holds an office in the East Wing of the White House, complete with her own staff to work on events and initiatives that stem from her office. But Bill Clinton would be a presidential spouse like no other, both because of his gender and his own eight-year tenure in the White House.

The Scarlet Woman Is Hawkish Against Iran (Rev 17:4)

Hillary Clinton Gives Speech On Countering Iran After The Nuclear Deal

Her plan focuses heavily on increased military aid to Israel.
Jessica Schulberg
Foreign Affairs Reporter, The Huffington Post

Posted: 09/09/2015 06:00 AM EDT | Edited: 09/09/2015 10:37 AM EDT

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton laid out a plan on Wednesday discussing ways to counter Iran’s regional influence once the nuclear accord is implemented. Her framework focuses on guaranteeing that Israel retains its qualitative military edge in the Middle East and working with allies in the Persian Gulf to crack down on Iran’s sponsorship of terrorist organizations in the region.

Clinton came out early in support of the nuclear deal struck between Iran, the U.S. and five world powers in July, and helped pave the way for the negotiations herself while serving as secretary of state. But Wednesday’s address at the Brookings Institution, which was, except for a few selected guests, viewable only via webcast, was her first substantive explanation of how she would manage “the day after” the nuclear agreement if she were to become commander-in-chief.

“By now, the outcome of the deal in Congress is no longer in much doubt,” Clinton said. “So we’ve got to start looking ahead to what comes next: enforcing it, deterring Iran and its proxies, and strengthening our allies.”

Clinton echoed the Obama administration’s pledges that the U.S. will continue to ensure that Israel’s military capabilities are superior to those of others in the region. She called for increased funding for Israel’s rocket and missile defense systems, including the Iron Dome, which Israel says intercepted 90 percent of the rockets fired from Gaza into populated areas during last year’s war with Hamas. She pushed to provide Israel with technology to detect tunnels used by Hamas to funnel fighters and weapons in and out of the blockaded Gaza strip. Clinton also announced that she supports selling the the F-35 to Israel, which would make it the only U.S. ally eligible for the new generation of fighter aircraft.

Clinton did not indicate whether she would support providing Israel with the massive ordnance penetrator, a 30,000-pound bunker-buster bomb that could theoretically be used against Iranian nuclear facilities if the agreement were to collapse. The Obama administration has quietly opposed the sale in the past, but a draft version of legislation authored by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) reportedly allows the Israelis access to the MOP. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) also publicly advocated for the weapons transfer when he came out in support of the nuclear accord last week.

This photo provided by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency shows crews loading a bomb, the massive ordnance penetrator, in a test Wednesday, March 14, 2007, at White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico. The conventional 30,000-pound penetrating bomb is designed to defeat deeply buried targets such as bunker and tunnel facilities. The massive ordnance penetrate, called MOP, will carry more than 5,300 pounds of explosives and deliver more than 10 times the explosive power of its predecessor, the BLU-109. (AP photo/Courtesy of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency)

The massive ordnance penetrator, a 30,000-pound bomb, could be used against Iranian nuclear facilities if the agreement were to collapse. Credit: Defense Threat Reduction Agency via Associated Press The massive ordnance penetrator, a 30,000-pound bomb, could be used against Iranian nuclear facilities if the agreement were to collapse.

With Democrats poised to save the nuclear deal from rejection on Capitol Hill and Republican presidential candidates threatening to tear up an accord they perceive as weak on their first day in office, Clinton’s remarks are a clear effort to prove that her support for the agreement doesn’t mean she will be soft on Iran’s non-nuclear activities.

“We need to be clear-eyed about what we can expect from Iran,” she said. “This isn’t the start of some broader diplomatic opening. And we shouldn’t expect that this deal will lead to a broader change in their behavior.”

In addition to boosting aid to Israel, Clinton called for increased cooperation with U.S. allies in the Gulf to counter Iran’s ability to back militant proxy groups in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and the occupied Palestinian territories. Critics and cautious supporters of the nuclear accord have both warned that at least some of the cash bound for Iran as a result of sanctions relief will go to arming its proxies.

Clinton zeroed in on cutting off Iran’s ability to fund and arm Hezbollah, the proxy in Lebanon that has been fighting alongside President Bashar al Assad in Syria. Her speech also called on U.S. allies to block Iranian planes from entering Syria. In addition, she recommended increasing the U.S. military presence in the Middle East as part of a broader effort to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz, a main passageway for the flow of international oil off the coast of Iran, remains open.

Clinton’s calls for putting more troops in the Middle East and blocking Iran’s efforts to prop up Assad signal that her approach to Syria would be hawkish compared to the cautious path taken by the Obama administration. Although President Barack Obama’s official position is that Assad has lost legitimacy as the leader of Syria, he balked at military action there in 2013 and has more recently acknowledged that Iran will need to play a role in any negotiated solution to the four-year-long civil war.

Irony: A Bush Criticizing A Clinton On Foreign Policy

The scarlet woman (Revelation 17:4)

Today in Politics: Jeb Bush Opens New Front in Attack on Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy Record

6:54 AM ET 6:54 AM ET The New York Times

Good Wednesday morning from what scientists now say is a dying universe and where Donald J. Trump remains the leader in Republican polls. But while he dabbled in policy discussions and held a large rally in Michigan on Tuesday, one of his major rivals, Jeb Bush, regained some of the spotlight by attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton over the Obama administration’s policies in the Middle East.
Republican attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s lucrative speeches and her comment that she was “dead broke” seem quaint compared with linking her to the violence, beheadings and instability sweeping the Middle East.

On Tuesday, Mr. Bush ushered in a new phase of the campaign, where Mrs. Clinton’s record at the State Department will face intense scrutiny for the rise of the Islamic State and the violence engulfing Syria and Iraq.

In a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., Mr. Bush said Mrs. Clinton “stood by” as secretary of state as the situation in Iraq worsened and the Obama administration pulled troops out, a vacuum that he said the Islamic State had rushed in to fill.
The Clinton campaign, in turn, cast the blame further back, saying that President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in the first place created the group. “ISIS grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” said Jake Sullivan, the Clinton campaign’s senior policy adviser, “It emerged in no small part as a result of President Bush’s failed strategy.”

Mrs. Clinton, whose vote to authorize the war in Iraq hurt her in the 2008 Democratic nominating contest, hardly talks about foreign policy or her time at the State Department. Instead, she devotes her town-hall-style events and speeches to policy areas like the economy, the environment and her new college affordability plan.

But as Mr. Bush made clear on Tuesday, Republicans will press the issue with Mrs. Clinton on foreign policy and over the Obama administration’s approach — whether over the spread of the Islamic State, the “reset” of relations with Russia or the nuclear deal with Iran.

— Amy Chozick

The Scarlet Woman Prepares For War Against Iran (Rev 17:4)

 

Clinton pledges to build on Iran deal as president and ‘keep the lid on’ Iranian nuclear program

By Anne Gearan August 10 at 8:11 PM

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Hillary Rodham Clinton pledged Monday to defend and further the international nuclear deal with Iran if she is elected president and said congressional rejection of the accord would send a signal of weakness to the rest of the world.

“I’m hoping that the agreement is final-approved and I will tell you that if it’s not, all bets are off,” Clinton said.

European nations as well as negotiating partners Russia and China will feel wronged if Congress fails to back President Obama by endorsing the accord, she said.

“They’re gonna say, ‘we stuck with the Americans, we agreed with the Americans and we hammered out this agreement,'” Clinton said. “And if their president can’t make foreign policy that is a very bad signal to send in a quickly moving and often dangerous world.”

Her influential former Senate colleague from New York, Sen. Charles E. Schumer, said last week he will oppose the deal, potentially opening the door for other Democrats to defy the White House. Republicans largely oppose the accord, but the White House expects to win some GOP support when Congress considers it next month.

The deal struck in July caps Iran’s nuclear abilities but does not guarantee that the Islamic republic can never find a path to a bomb. U.S. ally Israel opposes the deal, which Clinton helped set in motion as secretary of state.

In her most detailed discussion of the deal and the diplomatic run-up to it, Clinton walked a New Hampshire audience through more than five years of back-and-forth with United Nations Security Council members and then with Iran. She suggested that any deal will not be perfect, but said this one is sound.

“You play the hand you’re dealt,” Clinton said. “And we played that hand to get them to the table to make unprecedented concessions.”

Clinton said she would keep working as president to ensure the deal is kept.

“I will do everything necessary to make sure the lid stays on the nuclear weapons program, and I will begin to form a coalition against Iran on all the other things they do which are dangerous,” the Democratic front-runner said.

Anne Gearan is a national politics correspondent for The Washington Post.