The Scarlet Woman Looks Forward To Pressing The Button

Fingers on the Button: “First Use” and US Nuclear Weapons

Binoy Kampmark

Do you wait till the prospect of obliteration is upon you? Or initiate, blithely, a nuclear holocaust upon your enemy as a matter of what is termed “first use” by the nuclear weapon high priests? Neither prospect is particularly attractive, for each assumes the unthinkable made possible, madness made real.

In one way, even articulating a policy on first use or otherwise is a shoddy way of earning plaudits in the game of annihilation. The logic of obliteration remains. In any case, this was a debate that has transfixed the inner circles of Washington.

The latest fuss largely centres on revising the long held position in US strategic “thinking” that using nuclear weapons first should never be taken off the table. President Barack Obama, in the remaining months of his administration, is attempting to ruffle a few feathers in the strategic outlook in Washington on the use of nuclear weapons.

Keeping the first use option available became a critical feature of deterrent plans against a potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe, where its calamitous promise would hopefully chill the prospect of any such move. Such weapons would also come into play in potential actions in the Asian theatre, notably focused on North Korea and China.

Such murmurings from the Obama administration on a possible “No First Use” declaration caused shudders among some allies late last month – notably those taken with the shibboleth of Washington’s nuclear umbrella.

While scant on precise details, The Washington Post did suggest that Japan, South Korea, France and Britain had send urgent notes of concern to the administration feeling that such a move would be unwise and unnecessarily disruptive.[1]

The message of concern from Japan came straight from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, conveyed directly to Adm. Harry Harris Jr., head of US Pacific Command, while Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, reiterated his understanding that the diplomatic wires had been particularly hot on the subject. “The allies lobbying against [adopting no-first use] are nervous nellies.”
Such nervous nellies can also be found closer to home. Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz can be counted amongst them. Their concerns became clear at a National Security Council meeting in July.[2] Carter’s gripe was that having a no first use posture would risk fostering insecurity within US allied circles and dirtying the sacred notion of deterrence.

The central fallacy to such opposition lies in the self-deluding notion that nuclear deterrence has any genuine credibility. To keep that delusion alive entails staying firm on the issue of obliterating your enemy even as a matter of first course. The finger must be ever hovering above the button.

Such a stance does not convince the secretary-general of an A-bomb survivors group, Kazuo Okoshi, who has been particularly aggravated at Japanese opposition to the new slant in Washington. “North Korea repeatedly conducts nuclear tests. Deterrence is not working.”[3] Clearly.

James E. Cartwright, formerly a vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Bruce G. Blair, founder of the Global Zero Commission on Nuclear Risk Reduction, writing in the New York Times (Aug 14), made their pitch that nuclear weapons, in the post-Cold War thaw, served no other purpose “beyond deterring the first use of such weapons by our adversaries.”[4]

The United States, with its alliances, diplomatic and economic might, “our conventional and cyber weaponry our technological advantages, constitute a global military juggernaut unmatched in history.” If Washington’s adversaries refrain from using nuclear weapons, the US has no need to even consider the prospect.

While the authors do slip into the imperial-speak typical of such pronouncements (we have power far superior to others and all that), they make obvious points. Using such weapons against Russia and China would entail global death; employing such weapons against non-state actors would be “gratuitous”.

The more telling point here is that ditching first use would provide reassurances across the globe while saving oodles of money (less need for a strategic nuclear missile strike force, housed in expensive silos; a leaner force).

This giant, in short, will not act unless provoked, and if so, the results will be catastrophic to all concerned. This assumption is as much grounded in false assessment as it is in optimism, the ultimate point being that if you have such entities at hand, you will use them.

The normalisation such weapons of mass murder has exerted a numbing effect on the strategic establishment. Even Cartwright and Blair, both having been connected with the nuclear establishment in some way, never countenance a world free of nuclear weapons. They are in the business of risk reduction and norm creation, hoping that Obama’s embrace of a no-first use policy would cause other states to follow.

States in possession of them may well make superficial gestures: the odd promise to cull a certain type of delivery weapon; a scant reduction of warheads. Others will wheeze their way in response. None of this ultimately helps with the prospect of abolition – the mere existence of one such weapon is one too many.

Notes.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/allies-unite-to-block-an-obama-legacy/2016/08/14/cdb8d8e4-60b9-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html?utm_term=.faebaf5801d3
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/no-first-use-nuclear-policyproposal-assailed-by-u-s-cabinet-officials-allies-1471042014
[3] http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/08/16/national/politics-diplomacy/abe-tells-u-s-japans-concerns-obama-mulled-no-first-use-nuke-policy/#.V7O6m1t97Mw
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/opinion/end-the-first-use-policy-for-nuclear-weapons.html?_r=0

The Scarlet Woman Is A War Monger (Rev 17)

Clinton was hawkish on Iraq war

In his May 28 letter, B. J. Roberts accused M. Reza Behnam (letters, May 25) of conducting a “tirade” against Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness in foreign affairs, labeling as “innuendo” his claim that her efforts against Saddam Hussein aligned perfectly with the neocons in demonizing the Iraqi leader.

Innuendo?

Let’s consider that further.

Clinton was among the minority of congressional Democrats who supported Republican President George W. Bush’s request for authorization to invade and occupy Iraq, a vote she says she cast “with conviction.”

In spite of being informed beforehand by prominent arms control analysts that none of the Bush administration’s claims and charges regarding Hussein’s possession of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons was true, Clinton persisted that they weren’t in doubt, and said “if left unchecked, Saddam … will continue to increase his capacity” to wage such war, disregarding his total lack of delivery systems.

She further sought to discredit those questioning the administration’s alarmist rhetoric by insisting that Iraq’s possession of such weapons and weapons programs were true, and said “if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.”

She even went so far as to insist that Hussein would “employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States,” justifying “action by the United States to defend itself” via invasion and occupation of that country, now disintegrating into ruin.

Roberts’ charge of “innuendo” — defined as “an allusive or oblique remark or hint” — is easily dismissed.

Bob Thompson
Eugene

The Scarlet Woman Is a Hawk (Revelation 17)

Hillary Clinton’s Foreign-Policy Performance: The Worst. Ever


Crispin Rovere
June 2, 2016

As the general election heats up, Clinton supporters have been eager to tout the virtues of her foreign-policy experience relative to Donald Trump. And as a former Secretary of State and First Lady, no one questions Mrs Clinton’s bona fides in that regard.

There is just one problem. Foreign-policy stewardship over the past two decades has been the most cataclysmic for American interests abroad in the entire history of the Republic—and Clinton has been in favor of all the biggest mistakes.

First, there was the Iraq War. Without question, it was the single greatest foreign policy catastrophe of the past 40 years. Undertaken without UN endorsement, with a justification that was totally wrong, Iraq fast became a strategic quagmire. De-Baathification destroyed the Iraqi state, gave rise to a Sunni insurgency, and cost thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars. Hillary Clinton voted for the war.

Meanwhile, in 2003 Iran offered the United States a grand bargain. Everything was on the table. Iran would dismantle its nascent nuclear program, assist the U.S. stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq, cease its support of proxy militants and even accept the existence of Israel. The Bush administration rejected it. Back then Iran had tested a single ten-centrifuge cascade, which increased to over nineteen thousand centrifuges by 2014. Under the 2015 nuclear deal that limit is now over five thousand centrifuges, which continue to enrich uranium and will be upgraded in less than eight years’ time.

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton was a cheerleader for those overthrowing governments friendly to the United States (such as in Egypt). These governments ended up being replaced with the Muslim Brotherhood, dictatorship and chaos. The Arab uprisings, combined with the ham-fisted withdrawal from Iraq, led to the formation of ISIS, which subsequently took over much of Iraq and Syria, extending its reach deep into the surrounding Arab states.

This includes Libya. Gaddafi had previously given up his WMD program and sought to reconstitute himself into the international system. The price he paid for this cooperation was severe. Relying on Clinton’s assurances, Russia abstained from UN Resolution 1973, enabling military intervention to protect civilians under the explicit understanding that this would not mean regime change.

Clinton immediately reneged on the deal (which I warned against at the time). NATO bombing led to Gaddafi’s overthrow in favor of ISIS-style militants. Later, four Americans including Ambassador Stevens were murdered at an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi on Clinton’s watch. Today Libya is a failed state. Obama has since labelled this his single greatest failure as president, a failure for which Clinton is largely responsible.

So much for the reset. In the wake of the Libya betrayal Russia became hostile and resurgent in Europe (albeit not merely because of it). After the Georgia conflict Russia reorganized its military, and began fielding new medium-range missiles in violation of the INF Treaty. In 2014, Putin annexed Crimea and fueled the Ukrainian civil war in open defiance of NATO and the United States. Obama’s response has been risible.

And then there’s Syria. In 2011 Secretary Clinton then repeatedly stated “Assad must go” (FYI six years on he’s still in power). Obama destroyed America’s credibility around the world by imposing a ‘redline’ on chemical weapons being used in Syria that he was never willing to enforce. In the end Obama had to be bailed out by Russia, who brokered a deal with Assad to have those weapons removed.

Most damning, however, is Clinton’s boast about how she strongly advocated arming Sunni rebels against Assad. Of course, ISIS later captured Mosul, seizing billions of dollars in U.S. military equipment anyhow.

While the United States was lurching from one failure to the next in the Middle East, massive challenges arose in Asia. North Korea has now completed four nuclear tests of increasing sophistication, and has made strides in long range ballistic missiles and SLBM technology. As a consequence, Obama bequeaths his successor a North Korea that will have the capability to conduct a nuclear strike on the United States within an eight-year term of office.

To underscore just how feeble the United States has become over the past decade and a half, consider this mind-boggling statistic: when George W. Bush went into Iraq, the U.S. economy was eight times larger than China’s. Today, China’s economy is about three-quarters that of the U.S. and will certainly eclipse it within a decade.

China is America’s greatest long-term challenge, and is fast reemerging as a global superpower that seeks to expel the United States from Asia. It commits cyber theft on an industrial scale, employs mercantilist trade practices and currency manipulation, and of course, is asserting its expansive territorial claims by force. China has dredged three thousand acres of new land in the South China Sea, and Obama has done nothing to stop them. The U.S. Navy is increasingly unable to operate safely in the region, while China’s military budget continues to grow at double digits almost every year.

No matter where you look, whether it’s Iran’s expansion in the Middle East, Russia’s aggression in Europe, nuclear proliferation in rogue states, or China’s bid for regional hegemony, the verdict is in—those running American foreign policy have been an ignominious disgrace on every possible front and in every conceivable respect, and Hillary Clinton has been central to that failure.

Others have accurately foreshadowed American foreign policy under a new Clinton presidency. In clear contrast, Trump is centered in realism. As Senator Jeff Sessions recently confirmed, Trump’s foreign policy resembles that of Henry Kissinger. And as I’ve previously explained, this approach is best able to meet America’s key challenges and restore its pre-eminence in the world (See ‘Trump, a Nixon-Kissinger realist’).

Along this path Trump has taken positive steps. He’s now met personally with Kissinger, and delivered a major foreign policy speech where he laid out a realist platform: be unafraid of bold reform where a changing global environment demands it; ensure scarce resources support a cohesive strategy; and exercise sober reflection with respect to past failures in order to avoid their repetition—Not what America has been doing in recent times!

Under Hillary Clinton America’s foreign policy establishment has developed a culture of failure without accountability. As Donald Trump has said:

It’s time to shake the rust off America’s foreign policy… I have to look for talented experts with new approaches and practical ideas, rather than surrounding myself with those who have perfect resumes but very little to brag about except responsibility for a long history of failed policies and continued losses at war.

Hillary Clinton represents precisely that continuity—something that America can no longer afford.
Crispin Rovere is a member of the Australian Labor Party and previous convenor of the ACT ALP International Affairs Policy Committee. Formerly he was a PhD candidate at the ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC) and previously worked in Secretariat of the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, and published on nuclear policy.

The Scarlet Woman WILL Press The Nuclear Button (Rev 17:4)

Where will the next president stand on nuclear weapons?

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, right, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov press a red button symbolizing the intention to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations during their meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, Friday, March 6, 2009. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton raised the hope of U.S-Russian cooperation on missile defense Friday on her way to discussions with her Russian counterpart, with a goal of repairing the two nations’ relations. (AP Photo)

Rachel Whitlark

Rachel Whitlark is a post-doctoral research fellow with the Project on Managing the Atom and the International Security Program within the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at..

From Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from arms races to arms control, from the Cold War and its proxy wars to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2015 deal with Iran, few subjects have so consistently, and so controversially, concerned the American presidency as nuclear weapons have. A dozen men have been responsible for the decision to use the US nuclear arsenal since 1945, and whoever wins the election in November will inherit the responsibility for approximately 4,670 warheads at a time when relations with Russia (holder of 4,500 warheads) have reached a perilous low, a time when support for arms control is perhaps faltering, and a time when nuclear threats abound from the Middle East to the Korean Peninsula. Attempting to predict precisely how a candidate will govern after Election Day is always challenging. Presidential hopefuls often rely on rhetoric to get elected, and once in office confront numerous complex factors that crowd the decision-making environment and impact eventual policy choices. Still, issues like nuclear war and nuclear proliferation are too important to ignore until a new commander in chief assumes office next January. And although the topic has hardly gotten the attention it deserves in the election so far, most of the leading candidates have said enough about nuclear weapons that we can examine their positions in some detail. In fact, as ongoing academic research suggests, a candidate’s prior views on nuclear weapons may be more likely to influence his or her eventual policy choices as president.

The dealmaker. The most surprising thing about the candidates’ positions on nuclear policy might be that Donald Trump, the one contender who has never held public office, boasts a plentiful record on the topic, extending back at least as far as a 1987 interview with journalist Ron Rosenbaum. The author of a 2011 book about nuclear war, Rosenbaum recently recounted the episode for Slate, who also republished his original article, all of which makes for interesting reading. Rosenbaum recalls that Trump “seemed genuinely aware of just how much danger nukes put the world in” and how little had been done about it. The real-estate mogul, then in his early 40s, questioned the wisdom of popular nuclear-deterrence policies and said his uncle, a scientist at MIT, had gotten him interested in nuclear proliferation and terrorism. As he still does today, Trump identified proliferation as the number one problem confronting the United States—a position that’s difficult to reconcile with his recent comments supporting selective proliferation to key American allies. Still, it’s clear that Trump has engaged the issue of nuclear weapons since the days of the Reagan administration, and, if Rosenbaum’s original assessment still applies, has done so sincerely.

In 1987, with the Cold War still at the forefront of nuclear discussions, Trump pushed for Washington to do more with Moscow on the nuclear portfolio. Yet he seemed just as worried about potential failures of deterrence outside the US-Soviet relationship—between India and Pakistan, for example (Pakistan would ultimately acquire nuclear weapons in 1998), or as a bulwark against a terrorism-sponsoring dictator like Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, with whom he had a particular fascination. He also worried about “countries like France … blatantly selling nuclear technology.” His solution, not surprisingly given his profession, was a deal—a deal with the Soviet Union to prevent other states from going nuclear at all costs. It involved the Americans and the Soviets using economic pressure in their respective spheres of influence to forestall proliferation. When pressed, Trump reluctantly advocated using military force if economic punishments failed. “It’s not that [I] think he’s got the solution,” Rosenbaum wrote at the time, “but I like the visionary urgency he brings to the problem.”
Thirteen years later, Trump would advocate a similar position, with less reluctance, while discussing North Korea in his 2000 campaign book The America We Deserve: “Am I ready to bomb this reactor? You’re damned right. When the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor they were condemned … But they did what they had to do to survive.” In that same book he praised Richard Nixon (he of the “madman” school of foreign relations) for his work in bringing the Russians to the table for the first serious arms-control negotiations between the two superpowers and lauded Ronald Reagan for being “crazy like a fox,” a quality the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling touted in his 1966 book Arms and Influence: “Another paradox of deterrence is that it does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, cool-headed, and in control of oneself or one’s country.” Whether in the nuclear context or in describing US intervention policy, one can’t help but get the sense that Trump believes American leaders talk too much, telling our adversaries just what we’ll do and when.

In his 2011 book Time to Get Tough, Trump expanded his views on counter-proliferation and extended deterrence. He pointed to Israel, for whom keeping all options on the table—including military force—has proven effective against previous proliferation challenges. Foreshadowing his most recent comments about allied free-riding, he also described how South Korea “likes our military defending them against North Korea.” Recently, this last point brought Trump significant criticism for his seeming renunciation of decades of American policy—advocating that South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia might benefit from going nuclear instead of using the American nuclear umbrella for protection.

Trump was similarly criticized by opponent Ted Cruz for not knowing what the nuclear triad was, and for not having an answer about which leg(s) should be prioritized under proposed modernization plans. (Cruz stated his support for the modernization plans and said the submarine leg of the triad was its most significant priority.) Trump’s most recent comments, in a speech in Washington last week dedicated to his foreign policy, are critical of the Obama administration for allowing the nuclear arsenal to “atrophy,” but are ambiguous about his potential support for the current modernization proposal. Trump and Cruz do agree, however, on the use of tactical nuclear weapons against ISIS—a remarkably explicit position for candidates or leaders to utter. (As Cruz said, “I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.”) Trump seems also to regard nuclear weapons as an option of last resort in a wider range of contingencies (in line with current US policy), calling them “an absolute last step.” Elsewhere he has said, “Nobody is going to mess with us. But I would be very, very slow on the draw.”

Despite his longstanding interest in the issue of nuclear weapons, some of Trump’s recent remarks could use some clarification. He has suggested that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may not subscribe to rational deterrence, yet he also proposes that Japanese and South Korean nuclear weapons could deter and balance the threat from Pyongyang’s arsenal. He also ignores the potential risk of a costly and dangerous arms race in East Asia, which could include China and other neighboring states, should Japan and South Korea head in this direction.

The liberal hawk. Like Trump, Hillary Clinton has listed nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism as the most threatening issues (or among the most threatening) confronting the United States—as far back as 2003—and has worked personally on these issues throughout her career.

As a senator from 2001 to 2009, Clinton criticized what she saw as the Bush administration’s significant failures on nuclear policy. Specifically, she focused on the dangers of weakening US support for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Clinton was also a vocal advocate for the Nunn-Lugar initiative to increase security for nuclear material and a critic of President Bush for not doing enough on these significant issues. Running for president in 2007, she made overcoming these failures central to her message and pledged to strengthen the necessary institutions and alliances key to combatting proliferation and the threat from WMD terrorism, positions she has recommitted to in her current campaign.

Clinton also addressed the threats emanating from Iran and North Korea, and their links to terrorism and the nuclear black market. As a senator, she consistently voted for sanctions to pressure Iran to give up its weapons ambitions. She introduced the Dirty Bomb Prevention Act, designed to decrease the availability of and access to radiological materials, and cosponsored the Nuclear Facility and Material Security Act, intended to improve safety and security measures at national nuclear facilities. She has been explicit in keeping “all options on the table” to ensure that Iran does not go nuclear—a significant position for a candidate whose 2002 vote for the Iraq War showed she was ready to use military force as a counter-proliferation tool.

As secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Clinton continued to elevate nuclear proliferation as among her highest priorities. Alongside President Obama, she led the global efforts to pressure Iran to the negotiating table by designing one of the toughest international sanctions campaigns in recent history, and by authorizing the secret US-Iranian diplomatic channel in Oman that preceded the ultimately successful negotiations. This effort culminated in 2015 with Iran shipping out its stocks of enriched uranium, dramatically decreasing the number of operating centrifuges, foreclosing the plutonium pathway, and reducing the likelihood of a clandestine nuclear weapons program in Iran for at least 10 to 15 years. Clinton has also underscored how this diplomatic solution—backed by a combination of pressure and engagement—has not only blocked Iran’s path to the Bomb but has also prevented what might have turned into a dangerous regional arms race.

Likewise, she has focused on the threat emanating from North Korea. This was one aspect of Obama’s pivot to Asia—working to prevent the spread of WMD regionally and beyond. The challenge is familiar to Clinton—it was Bill Clinton whose efforts to prevent North Korea’s nuclearization in the early 1990s led to the Agreed Framework, which blocked the Kim regime’s plutonium pathway for more than a decade, avoiding what might have been a costly war. In her 2003 book Living History, Clinton articulated the dangers North Korea posed both as a proliferation risk itself, but also as a black-market actor, poised to sell “the world’s most lethal substance to the highest bidder.” As secretary of state, Clinton urged sanctions following repeated provocations and nuclear advancements, as well as regional pressure through an augmented US military presence.

Finally, Clinton provided critical support for the rest of Obama’s nuclear security initiative, the so-called “Prague Agenda.” She also worked to secure the 2010 New START agreement, bringing Russian and American arsenals down to their lowest size in decades, and reinstating vital verification measures that had previously lapsed. In particular, as she wrote in Hard Choices, she used her congressional connections to secure key Republican votes needed to ensure treaty ratification. Prior to the 2008 election, she argued that “taking dramatic steps to reduce our nuclear arsenal would build support for the coalitions we need to address the threat of nuclear proliferation.” A President Clinton would likely continue efforts on nuclear security, seek opportunities to reengage on arms control with Russia, and take a tough or tougher line with Iran and North Korea. Her most recent comments—“any nation or group that supports or enables terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction will be held accountable”—suggest she would pay more attention to state-based sponsorship than Obama has recently. There may also be a more limited focus on the effort to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide.

The rest of the pack. Fewer positions are attributable to Cruz, Sanders, and John Kasich since they have said and written much less about nuclear matters—both during and prior to their presidential campaigns. Cruz’s short political tenure (three years as a US senator) and lack of foreign policy focus means that much of what exists reflects current debates over Iran and nuclear modernization. Kasich, the governor of Ohio since 2010, is described as a budget-conscious defense hawk, but he too has focused little on nuclear affairs. And Bernie Sanders, despite a lengthy political career, including a quarter-century in the House and the Senate, has largely prioritized domestic topics, leaving him vulnerable to criticisms of foreign policy ignorance and inexperience. (Exceptions to this would include significant work on veterans’ affairs and, more relevant here, engagement on the domestic energy, climate, and industrial aspects of nuclear power, as overseen by the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety, of which he is a member.) Nevertheless, it’s worth recording what we do know about each of these other three candidates.

On his website, Cruz lists six pillars for securing America and defending the nation. The sixth is ripping up the Iran deal. Cruz has said his position is motivated by a lack of “anytime—anywhere” inspections and by the potential for a monetary windfall emboldening the Iranian regime. Cruz’s hostility, though, precedes the deal’s implementation: In March 2015, he joined 46 fellow senators in signing a letter to Iran describing the deal as simply an executive order—subject to review, modification, or termination under the next administration. Cruz also introduced the Sanction Iran, Safeguard America Act to further pressure Iran and complicate efforts to ensure the deal’s implementation. He introduced a resolution in 2015 designating the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. (Clinton co-sponsored a similar resolution in 2007.) Cruz recently endorsed a 10-year extension of the Iran Sanctions Act, and has supported other measures designed to undermine the negotiated solution.

Regarding the potential challenge from North Korean nuclear weapons, Cruz has described how the regime in Pyongyang is not suicidal and subscribes to some notion of rational deterrence. Subsequently, this February, he left the campaign trail for Washington to cast a vote in favor of a new round of missile-related sanctions. Despite voicing similar concerns, Sanders did not return to vote. Elsewhere on the Republican side, Kasich called for a harder line on North Korea. Beyond Iran and North Korea, Cruz has indicated his support for ballistic missile defense and nuclear modernization, as noted above.
According to Sanders, a nuclear-armed Iran threatens to further destabilize the Middle East and spur a dangerous arms race. Generally preferring negotiated, multilateral solutions, Sanders, in contrast to many Republicans, views the 2015 deal as the best option for forestalling a nuclear-armed Iran. Sanders is also the only candidate on either side of the aisle who has not vocally advocated for the use of force as a possible counter-proliferation strategy. Even Kasich, who has criticized those who would end the deal on day one, saying they were “inexperienced” and “playing to a crowd,” said that “if we think they’re getting close to … developing a nuclear weapon… you better believe that I would do everything in my power as the commander-in-chief to stop them from have a nuclear weapon.” Sanders also voted against the Iraq War, despite its intended goal of preventing Iraqi nuclear acquisition. Like Clinton, Sanders endorses the notion of a world without nuclear weapons. He has voiced skepticism with the current $1 trillion modernization plan, and may be likely to oppose such efforts going forward. Conversely, Kasich supports the modernization effort—despite being a known defense hawk and favoring balanced budgets in Ohio and Washington.

It’s also worth noting that in 2009 Sanders voted in favor of New START. In 2002, when still in the House, he voted to prohibit the use of defense funds for new nuclear weapons as well as to remove funding for space-based missile defense from a Pentagon appropriations bill. Around the same time, Clinton voted to shift funds allocated for missile defense to nonproliferation efforts instead.
Room for improvement. What are we to make of all of this? It is clear that Trump has been thinking about nuclear issues far longer than his current presidential bid. It is perhaps curious, then, given the accusations of foreign policy inexperience and ignorance that his competitors have levied, that he has not raised his well-documented positions. This seems especially perplexing in light of the fact that his main rival’s expertise amounts to three short years as a senator. One potential explanation for Trump’s relative silence is that his and Cruz’s positions on nuclear matters seem more similar than distinct: To varying degrees, both have criticized the deal with Iran; both see potential in using nuclear weapons against ISIS and perhaps elsewhere; and both focus on state-based nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea. There are differences, though. Cruz sees North Korea as rationally deterred, while Trump disagrees. Cruz (along with Kasich) has supported missile defense, which Trump has opposed—though not because it couldn’t work, but rather, in an echo of his fears from the 1980s, because “in this age of miniaturization, our real threat is not going to be flying in on a missile. It’s going to be delivered in a van, or a suitcase, or a fire-hydrant sized canister.” If there is more to the similarities than the differences, highlighting nuclear issues may be unhelpful for Trump. Given that neither Cruz nor Trump has demonstrated much penchant for nuance on the campaign trail, this may be unsurprising—particularly in light of the extremely small constituencies familiar with the details of nuclear policy. One further possibility is that even Trump, for whom very little seems sacred, sees nuclear rhetoric as very high stakes.

Despite an overcrowded domestic and international landscape, nuclear policy should still occupy a central place on every candidate’s agenda, as Clinton herself has said. The few remaining candidates hold different views on critical issues, including proliferation, security, and the role of nuclear weapons in the US military apparatus. While Trump may have been thinking about nuclear matters the longest (at least according to available records), he has not yet come out in support of a world without nuclear weapons. While Clinton advocated repeatedly for the use of force as a counter-proliferation strategy, she has most recently backed the use of force as a signal of credibility and strength undergirding the Iran deal’s diplomatic solution. Regardless of how one feels about the deal, it is likely that only a Clinton or Sanders presidency would keep it firmly in place; the Republicans have all voiced some opposition, though it’s unclear how quickly the deal itself could be annulled or modified. While Sanders is the most likely candidate to veto US nuclear modernization plans, only Cruz and Trump have explained how they could envision using nuclear weapons in a future conflict.
Clearly the candidates from both major parties leave much to be desired in their positions on nuclear issues. Individually and collectively, these positions are far too superficial for people hoping to occupy the Oval Office. Given the stakes, the nuclear portfolio demands much more than the cursory treatment it presently receives.

The Scarlet Woman Is A Hawk (Revelation 17:4)

How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER 3 days ago

© Dusan Vranic/AFP/Getty Images Clinton touring an Army barrack in Baghdad in 2003, while still the junior senator from New York and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Hillary Clinton sat in the hideaway study off her ceremonial office in the State Department, sipping tea and taking stock of her first year on the job. The study was more like a den — cozy and wood-paneled, lined with bookshelves that displayed mementos from Clinton’s three decades in the public eye: a statue of her heroine, Eleanor Roosevelt; a baseball signed by the Chicago Cubs star Ernie Banks; a carved wooden figure of a pregnant African woman. The intimate setting lent itself to a less-formal interview than the usual locale, her imposing outer office, with its marble fireplace, heavy drapes, crystal chandelier and ornate wall sconces. On the morning of Feb. 26, 2010, however, Clinton was talking about something more sensitive than mere foreign affairs: her relationship with Barack Obama. To say she chose her words carefully doesn’t do justice to the delicacy of the exercise. She was like a bomb-squad technician, deciding which color wire to snip without blowing up her relationship with the White House.

© Mark Wilson-Pool/Associated Press Clinton visiting the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea in 2010 as secretary of state. “We’ve developed, I think, a very good rapport, really positive back-and-forth about everything you can imagine,” Clinton said about the man she described during the 2008 campaign as naïve, irresponsible and hopelessly unprepared to be president. “And we’ve had some interesting and even unusual experiences along the way.”
She leaned forward as she spoke, gesturing with her hands and laughing easily. In talking with reporters, Clinton displays more warmth than Obama does, though there’s less of an expectation that she might say something revealing.
Clinton singled out, as she often would, the United Nations climate-change meeting in Copenhagen the previous December, where she and Obama worked together to save the meeting from collapse. She brought up the Middle East peace proc­ess, a signature project of the president’s, which she had been tasked with reviving. But she was understandably wary of talking about areas in which she and Obama split — namely, on bedrock issues of war and peace, where Clinton’s more activist philosophy had already collided in unpredictable ways with her boss’s instincts toward restraint. She had backed Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recommendation to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, before endorsing a fallback proposal of 30,000 (Obama went along with that, though he stipulated that the soldiers would begin to pull out again in July 2011, which she viewed as problematic). She supported the Pentagon’s plan to leave behind a residual force of 10,000 to 20,000 American troops in Iraq (Obama balked at this, largely because of his inability to win legal protections from the Iraqis, a failure that was to haunt him when the Islamic State overran much of the country). And she pressed for the United States to funnel arms to the rebels in Syria’s civil war (an idea Obama initially rebuffed before later, halfheartedly, coming around to it).
That fundamental tension between Clinton and the president would continue to be a defining feature of her four-year tenure as secretary of state. In the administration’s first high-level meeting on Russia in February 2009, aides to Obama proposed that the United States make some symbolic concessions to Russia as a gesture of its good will in resetting the relationship. Clinton, the last to speak, brusquely rejected the idea, saying, “I’m not giving up anything for nothing.” Her hardheadedness made an impression on Robert Gates, the defense secretary and George W. Bush holdover who was wary of a changed Russia. He decided there and then that she was someone he could do business with.
“I thought, This is a tough lady,” he told me.
A few months after my interview in her office, another split emerged when Obama picked up a secure phone for a weekend conference call with Clinton, Gates and a handful of other advisers. It was July 2010, four months after the North Korean military torpedoed a South Korean Navy corvette, sinking it and killing 46 sailors. Now, after weeks of fierce debate between the Pentagon and the State Department, the United States was gearing up to respond to this brazen provocation. The tentative plan — developed by Clinton’s deputy at State, James Steinberg — was to dispatch the aircraft carrier George Washington into coastal waters to the east of North Korea as an unusual show of force.
But Adm. Robert Willard, then the Pacific commander, wanted to send the carrier on a more aggressive course, into the Yellow Sea, between North Korea and China. The Chinese foreign ministry had warned the United States against the move, which for Willard was all the more reason to press forward. He pushed the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, who in turn pushed his boss, the defense secretary, to reroute the George Washington. Gates agreed, but he needed the commander in chief to sign off on a decision that could have political as well as military repercussions.
Gates laid out the case for diverting the George Washington to the Yellow Sea: that the United States should not look as if it was yielding to China. Clinton strongly seconded it. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she had said to her aides a few days earlier. (The Vince Lombardi imitation drew giggles from her staff, who, even 18 months into her tenure, still marveled at her pugnacity.)
Obama, though, was not persuaded. The George Washington was already underway; changing its course was not a decision to make on the fly.
“I don’t call audibles with aircraft carriers,” he said — unwittingly one-upping Clinton on her football metaphor.
It wasn’t the last debate in which she would side with Gates. The two quickly discovered that they shared a Midwestern upbringing, a taste for a stiff drink after a long day of work and a deep-seated skepticism about the intentions of America’s foes. Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst who conducted Obama’s initial review on the Afghanistan war, says: “I think one of the surprises for Gates and the military was, here they come in expecting a very left-of-center administration, and they discover that they have a secretary of state who’s a little bit right of them on these issues — a little more eager than they are, to a certain extent. Particularly on Afghanistan, where I think Gates knew more had to be done, knew more troops needed to be sent in, but had a lot of doubts about whether it would work.”
As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.
“Hillary is very much a member of the traditional American foreign-policy establishment,” says Vali Nasr, a foreign-policy strategist who advised her on Pakistan and Afghanistan at the State Department. “She believes, like presidents going back to the Reagan or Kennedy years, in the importance of the military — in solving terrorism, in asserting American influence. The shift with Obama is that he went from reliance on the military to the intelligence agencies. Their position was, ‘All you need to deal with terrorism is N.S.A. and C.I.A., drones and special ops.’ So the C.I.A. gave Obama an angle, if you will, to be simultaneously hawkish and shun using the military.”
Unlike other recent presidents — Obama, George W. Bush or her husband, Bill Clinton — Hillary Clinton would assume the office with a long record on national security. There are many ways to examine that record, but one of the most revealing is to explore her decades-long cultivation of the military — not just civilian leaders like Gates, but also its high-ranking commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong belief that the calculated use of military power is vital to defending national interests, that American intervention does more good than harm and that the writ of the United States properly reaches, as Bush once put it, into “any dark corner of the world.” Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton is the last true hawk left in the race.
For those who know Clinton’s biography, her embrace of the military should come as no surprise. She grew up in the buoyant aftermath of World War II, the daughter of a Navy petty officer who trained young sailors before they shipped out to the Pacific. Her father, Hugh Rodham, was a staunch Republican and an anticommunist, and she channeled his views. She talks often about her girlhood dream of becoming an astronaut, citing the rejection letter she got from NASA as the first time she encountered gender discrimination. Her real motive for volunteering, she has written, may have been because her father fretted that “America was lagging behind Russia.”
Political conversion came later, after Vietnam and the ’60s swept over Wellesley College, where she spoke out against the establishment at her graduation. But even in the tumultuous year of 1968, she was still making her transition from Republican to Democrat, managing to go to the conventions of both parties. As a Republican intern in Washington that summer, she questioned a Wisconsin congressman, Melvin Laird, about the wisdom of Lyndon B. Johnson’s escalating involvement in Southeast Asia.
It was after law school that she had her most curious encounter with the military. In 1975, the year she married Bill Clinton, she stopped in at a Marine recruiting office in Arkansas to inquire about joining the active forces or reserves. She was a lawyer, she explained; maybe there was some way she could serve. The recruiter, she recalled two decades later, was a young man of about 21, in prime physical condition. Clinton was then 27, freshly transplanted from Washington, teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses. “You’re too old, you can’t see and you’re a woman,” he told her. “Maybe the dogs will take you,” he added, in what she said was a pejorative reference to the Army.
“It was not a very encouraging conversation,” Clinton said at a lunch for military women on Capitol Hill in 1994. “I decided, Maybe I’ll look for another way to serve my country.”
Some reporters have cast doubt on the veracity of this story, which she repeated in the fall of 2015 over breakfast with voters in New Hampshire: certainly, there’s no concrete evidence that it happened, and Bill gave a different account of it in 2008, substituting the Army for the Marines. Why would a professionally minded Yale Law graduate, on the cusp of marriage, suddenly want to put on a uniform? It’s impossible to decipher her possible motives, but Ann Henry, an old friend who taught at the university after Clinton moved to Little Rock, offers a theory: During those days, she recalls, female faculty members, as an exercise, would test the boundaries of careers that appeared closed to women. “I don’t think it’s made up,” she says. “It was consistent with something she would have done.”
Clinton’s next sustained exposure to the military did not come until she was first lady, almost two decades later. Living in the White House is, in many ways, like living in a military compound. A Marine stands guard in front of the West Wing when the president is in the Oval Office. The Mili­tary Office operates the medical center and the telecommunications system. The Navy runs the cafeteria, the Marines transport the president by helicopter, the Air Force by plane. Camp David is a naval facility. The daily contact with men and women in uniform, Clinton’s friends say, deepened her feelings for them.
In March 1996, the first lady visited American troops stationed in Bosnia. The trip became notorious years later when she claimed, during the 2008 campaign, to have dodged sniper fire after her C-17 military plane landed at an American base in Tuzla. (Chris Hill, a diplomat who was onboard that day and later served as ambassador to Iraq under Clinton, didn’t remember snipers at all, and indeed recalled children handing her bouquets of spring flowers.) But there was no faking the good vibes during her tour of the mess and rec halls. With her teenage daughter at her side, she bantered and joked with the young servicemen and women — an experience, she wrote, that “left lasting impressions on Chelsea and me.”
When Clinton was elected to the Senate, she had strong political reasons to care about the mili­tary. The Pentagon was in the midst of a long, politically charged process of closing military bases; New York State had already been a victim, when Plattsburgh Air Force Base was closed in 1995, a loss of 352 civilian jobs for that hard-luck North Country town. New York’s delegation was determined to protect its remaining bases, especially Fort Drum, home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division, which sprawls over a hundred thousand acres in rural Jefferson County. In October 2001, a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Clinton traveled to Fort Drum at the invitation of Gen. Buster Hagenbeck, who had just been named the division’s commander and would be deployed to Afghanistan a month later. Like many of the officers I spoke with, he had preconceptions of Clinton from her years as first lady; the woman who showed up at his office around happy hour that afternoon did not fulfill them.
“She sat down,” he recalls, “took her shoes off, put her feet up on the coffee table and said, ‘General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?’ ”
It was the start of a dialogue that stretched over two wars. In the spring of 2002, Hagenbeck led Operation Anaconda, a 16-day assault on Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters in the Shah-i-Kot Valley that was the largest combat engagement of the war to date. When the general came back to Washington to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clinton took him out to dinner on Capitol Hill for her own briefing. They also spoke about the Bush administration’s preparations for war in Iraq, something which Hagenbeck was following anxiously. The general, it turned out, was more of a dove than the senator. He warned her about the risks of an invasion, which was then being war-gamed inside the Pentagon. It would be like “kicking over a bee’s nest,” he said.
Hagenbeck excused Clinton’s vote in 2002 to authorize military action in Iraq. “She made a considered call,” he says. And “she was chagrined, much after the fact.” For him, what mattered more than Clinton’s voting record was her unstinting public support of the military, whether in protecting Fort Drum or backing him during a difficult first year in Afghanistan.
Clinton’s education in military affairs began in earnest in 2002, after the Democratic Party’s crushing defeat in midterm elections moved her up several rungs in Senate seniority. The party’s congressional leaders offered her a seat on either the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the Senate Armed Services Committee. She chose Armed Services, spurning a long tradition of New York senators, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jacob Javits, who coveted the prestige of Foreign Relations. Armed Services deals with more earthbound issues, like benefits for veterans, and it had long been the preserve of Republican hawks like John McCain. But after 9/11, Clinton saw Armed Services as better preparation for her future. For a politician looking to hone hard-power credentials — a woman who aspired to be commander in chief — it was the perfect training ground. She dug in like a grunt at boot camp.
Andrew Shapiro, then Senator Clinton’s foreign-policy adviser, called upon 10 experts — including Bill Perry, who was defense secretary under her husband, and Ashton Carter, who would eventually become President Obama’s fourth defense secretary — to tutor her on everything from grand strategy to defense procurement. She met quietly with Andrew Marshall, an octogenarian strategist at the Pentagon who labored for decades in the blandly named Office of Net Assessment, earning the nickname Yoda for his Delphic insights. She went to every committee meeting, no matter how mundane. Aides recall her on C-SPAN3, sitting alone in the chamber, patiently questioning a lieutenant colonel. She visited the troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving Day in 2003 and spoke at every significant military installation in New York State. By then — 30 years after she recalled being rejected by a Marine recruiter in Arkansas — Hillary Clinton had become a military wonk.
Jack Keane is one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq surge; he is also perhaps the greatest single influence on the way Hillary Clinton thinks about military issues. A bear of a man with a jowly, careworn face and Brylcreem-slicked hair, Keane exudes the supreme self-confidence you would expect of a retired four-star general. He speaks with a trace of a New York accent that gives his pronouncements a rat-a-tat urgency. He is also a well-compensated member of the military-industrial complex, sitting on the board of General Dynamics and serving as a strategic adviser to Academi, the private-security contractor once known as Blackwater. And he is the chairman of an aptly named think tank, the Institute for the Study of War. Though he is one of a parade of cable-TV generals, Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News, where he appears regularly to call for the United States to use greater military force in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He doesn’t shrink from putting boots on the ground and has little use for civilian leaders, like Obama, who do.
Keane first got to know Clinton in the fall of 2001, when she was a freshman senator and he was the Army’s second in command, with a distinguished combat and command record in Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. He had expected her to be intelligent, hard-working and politically astute, but he was not prepared for the respect she showed for the Army as an institution, or her sympathy for the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families. Keane was confident he could smell a phony politician a mile away, and he didn’t get that whiff from her.
“I read people; that’s one of my strengths,” he told me. “It’s not that I can’t be fooled, but I’m not fooled often.”
Clinton took an instant liking to Keane, too. “She loves that Irish gruff thing,” says one of her Senate aides, Kris Balderston, who was in the room that day. When Keane got up after 45 minutes to leave for a meeting back at the Pentagon with a Polish general, she protested that she wasn’t finished yet and asked for another appointment. “I said, ‘O.K., but it took me three months to get this one,’ ” Keane told her dryly.
Clinton exploded into a raucous laugh. “I’ll take care of that problem,” she promised.
She was true to her word: The two would meet many times over the next decade, discussing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Iranian nu­clear threat and other flash points in the Middle East. Sometimes he dropped by her Senate office; other times they met for dinner or drinks. He escorted her on her first visit to Fort Drum and set up her first trip to Iraq.
They generally agreed to forgo talk of politics, but at a meeting in Clinton’s Senate office in January 2007, Keane tried to sell her on the logic of a troop surge in Iraq. The previous month, he had met with President Bush in the Oval Office to recommend that the United States deploy five to eight Army and Marine brigades to wage an urban counterinsurgency campaign; only that, he argued, would stabilize a country being ripped apart by sectarian strife. His presentation angered some of Keane’s fellow generals, who feared that such a strategy would deepen Iraq’s dependency and prolong America’s involvement. But it had a big impact on the commander in chief, who soon ordered more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq.
Clinton was another story. “I’m convinced it’s not going to work, Jack,” she told him. She predicted that the American soldiers patrolling in Iraqi cities and towns would be “blown up” by Sunni militias or Al Qaeda fighters. “She thought we would fail,” Keane recalls, “and it was going to cause increased casualties.”
Politics, of course, was also on her mind. Barack Obama was laying the groundwork for his candidacy in mid-January with a campaign that would emphasize his opposition to the Iraq War and her vote in favor of it — a vote that still shadows her in this year’s Democratic primaries. Obama was setting off on a fund-raising drive that would net $25 million in three months, sending tremors through Clinton’s political camp and establishing him as a formidable rival. Although she disagreed with Keane about Iraq, Clinton asked him to become a formal adviser. “As much as I respect you,” he replied, “I can’t do that.” Keane’s wife had health problems that had moved up his retirement from the Army, and he did not, as a policy, endorse candidates. Sometime during 2008 — he doesn’t remember exactly when — Clinton told him she had erred in doubting the wisdom of the surge. “She said, ‘You were right, this really did work,’ ” Keane recalls. “On issues of national security,” he says, “I thought she was always intellectually honest with me.”
He and Clinton continued to talk, even after Obama was elected and she became secretary of state. More often than not, they found themselves in sync. Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust intervention in Syria than Obama did. In April 2015, the week before she announced her candidacy, Clinton asked him for a briefing on military options for dealing with the fighters of the Islamic State. Bringing along three young female analysts from the Institute for the Study of War, Keane gave her a 2-hour-20-minute presentation. Among other steps, he advocated imposing a no-fly zone over parts of Syria that would neutralize the air power of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with a goal of forcing him into a political settlement with opposition groups. Six months later, Clinton publicly adopted this position, further distancing herself from Obama.
“I’m convinced this president, no matter what the circumstances, will never put any boots on the ground to do anything, even when it’s compelling,” Keane told me. He was sitting in the library at his home in McLean, Va., which is lined with books on military history and strategy. His critique of Obama was hardly new or original, but much of it mirrors the thinking of Clinton and her policy advisers. “One of the problems the president has, which weakens his diplomatic efforts, is that leaders don’t believe he would use military power. That’s an issue that would separate the president from Hillary Clinton rather dramatically. She would look at military force as another realistic option, but only where there is no other option.”
Befriending Keane wasn’t just about cultivating a single adviser. It gave Clinton instant entree to his informal network of active-duty and retired generals. The most interesting by far was David Petraeus, a cerebral commander who shared Clinton’s jet-fueled ambition and whose life stories would mix heady success with humbling setbacks. Both would be accused of mishandling classified information — Clinton because of her use of a private server and email address to conduct sensitive government business, a decision that erupted into a political scandal; Petraeus because he had given a diary containing classified information to his biographer and mistress (he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor for mishandling classified information).
On Clinton’s first trip to Iraq in November 2003, Petraeus, then a two-star general commanding the 101st Airborne Division, flew from his field headquarters in Mosul to the relative safety of Kirkuk to brief her congressional delegation. “She was full of questions,” he recalls. “It was the kind of gesture that means a lot to a battlefield commander.” On subsequent trips, as he rose in rank, Petraeus walked her through his plans to train and equip Iraqi Army troops, a forerunner of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. It worked to their mutual benefit: Petraeus was building ties to a prominent Democratic voice in the Senate; Clinton was burnishing her image as a friend of the troops. “She did it the old-fashioned way,” he says. “She did it by pursuing relationships.” When Petraeus was sent back to Iraq as the top commander in early 2007, he gave every member of the Senate Armed Services Committee a copy of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which he edited during a tour at Fort Leavenworth. Clinton read hers from cover to cover.
Although Clinton’s reservations about the surge were valid — the stability that the additional troops brought to Iraq didn’t last — her opposition to it, like her vote for the war, came back to haunt her. This time, it was her ally Bob Gates who summoned the ghost. In his memoirs, Gates wrote that she confessed to him and the president that her position had been politically motivated, because she was then facing Obama in the Iowa caucuses. (Obama, he wrote, “vaguely” conceded that he, too, had opposed it for political reasons.) Clinton pushed back, telling Diane Sawyer of ABC News that Gates “perhaps either missed the context or the meaning, because I did oppose the surge.” Her opposition, she told Sawyer, was driven by the fact that at that time, people were not going to accept any escalation of the war. “This is not politics in electoral, political terms,” Clinton said. “This is politics in the sense of the American public has to support commitments like this.”
The next time she found herself in a debate over sending troops into harm’s way, she voiced no such reservations.
“We need maps,” Hillary Clinton told her aides.
It was early October 2009, and she had just returned from a meeting in the Situation Room. Obama’s war cabinet was debating how many additional troops to send to Afghanistan, where the United States, preoccupied by Iraq, had allowed the Taliban to regroup. The Pentagon, she reported, had used impressive, color-coded maps to show its plans to deploy troops around the country. The attention to detail made Gates and his commanders look crisp and well prepared; the State Department, which was pushing a “civilian surge” to accompany the troops, looked wan by comparison. At the next meeting, on Oct. 14, the team from State unfurled its own maps to show the deployment of an army of aid workers, diplomats, legal experts and crop specialists who were supposed to follow the soldiers into Afghanistan.
Clinton’s fixation with maps was typical of her mind-set in the first great war-and-peace debate of the Obama presidency. She wanted to be taken seriously, even if her department was less central than the Pentagon. One way to do that was by promoting the civilian surge, the pet project of her friend and special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke. “She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon,” a senior adviser recalls. She also didn’t hesitate to get into the Pentagon’s business, asking detailed questions about the training of Afghan troops and wading into the weeds of military planning.
She resolved not to miss out on anything — a determination that may have been rooted in a deeper insecurity about her role in what was to become the most White House-centric administration of the modern era. On the morning of June 8, 2009, she emailed two aides to say: “I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?” On Feb. 10, 2010, she dialed the White House from her home, but couldn’t get past the switchboard operator, who didn’t believe she was really Hillary Clinton. Asked to provide her office number to prove her identity, she said she didn’t know it. Finally, Clinton hung up in frustration and placed the call again through the State Department Operations Center — “like a proper and properly dependent secretary of state,” as she later wrote to one aide in a mock-chastened tone. “No independent dialing allowed.”
The Afghan troop debate, a three-month drama of dueling egos, leaked documents and endless deliberations, is typically framed as a test of wills between the Pentagon’s wily military commanders and an inexperienced young president, with Joe Biden playing the role of devil’s advocate for Obama. While that portrait is accurate, it neglects the role of Clinton. By siding with Gates and the generals, she gave political ballast to their proposals and provided a bullish counterpoint to Biden’s skepticism. Her role should not be overstated: She did not turn the debate, nor did she bring to it any distinctive point of view. But her unstinting support of General McChrystal’s maximalist recommendation made it harder for Obama to choose a lesser option. (McChrystal was later fired by Obama after his aides made derogatory remarks about almost every member of his war cabinet to Rolling Stone magazine; she was the exception. “Hillary had Stan’s back,” one of his aides told the reporter, Michael Hastings.)
“Hillary was adamant in her support for what Stan asked for,” Gates says. “She made clear that she was ready to support his request for the full 40,000 troops. She then made clear that she was only willing to go with the 30,000 number because I proposed it. She was, in a way, tougher on the numbers in the surge than I was.” Gates believed that if he could align Clinton; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen; the commander of Central Command, David Petraeus; and himself behind a common position, it would be hard for Obama to say no. “How could you ignore these Four Horsemen of national security?” says Geoff Morrell, who served as the Pentagon press secretary at the time.
Just as Clinton benefited from her alliance with the military commanders, she gave them political cover. “Here’s the dirty little secret,” says Tom Nides, her former deputy secretary of state for management and resources. “They all knew they wanted her on their side. They knew that if they walked into the Situation Room and they had her, it made a huge difference in the dynamics. When she opened her mouth, she could change the momentum in the room.”
David Axelrod recalls one meeting where Clinton “kicked the thing off and pretty much articulated their opinion; I’m sure that’s one that they remember. There’s no doubt that she wanted to give them every troop that McChrystal was asking for.” Still, Clinton didn’t prevail on every argument. After agreeing to send the troops, Obama added a condition of his own: that the soldiers be deployed as quickly as possible and pulled out again, starting in the summer of 2011 — a deadline that proved more fateful in the long run than a difference of 10,000 troops. Clinton opposed setting a public deadline for withdrawal, arguing that it would tip America’s hand to the Taliban and encourage them to wait out the United States — which, in fact, was exactly what happened.
In the final days of the debate, Clinton also found herself at odds with her own ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry. He, too, held different views than she did on the wisdom of a surge, which he put into writing. On Nov. 6, 2009, in a long cable addressed to Clinton — and later leaked to The New York Times — he made a trenchant, convincing case for why the McChrystal proposal, which she endorsed two weeks earlier in a meeting with Obama, would saddle the United States with “vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale military role in Afghanistan.”
Much of Eikenberry’s analysis proved prescient, particularly his warnings about the threadbare American partnership with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. It carried an extra sting because he was a retired three-star Army general who was the commander in Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. Clinton, who had not asked for the cable, was furious, fearing it could upset a debate in which she and the Pentagon were about to prevail.
What the cable made clear was the degree to which the Afghanistan debate was dominated by military considerations. While Clinton did raise the need to deal with Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, her reflexive support of Gates, Petraeus and McChrystal meant she was not a powerful voice for diplomatic alternatives. “She contributed to the overmilitarizing of the analysis of the problem,” says Sarah Chayes, who was an adviser to McChrystal and later to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen.
In October 2015, the persistent violence in Afghanistan and the legacy of Karzai’s misrule forced Obama to reverse his plan to withdraw the last American soldiers by the end of his presi­dency. A few thousand troops will stay there indefinitely. And for all of Clinton’s talk about a civilian surge, it never really materialized.
For Clinton, the Afghanistan episode laid bare a vexed relationship between her and Eikenberry, one of the few generals with whom she didn’t hit it off. A soldier-scholar with graduate degrees from Harvard and Stanford, Eikenberry was brilliant but had a reputation among his colleagues for being imperious. Clinton had a similarly chilly relationship with Douglas Lute, another Army lieutenant general with a graduate degree from Harvard, who also fought with Holbrooke. “She likes the nail-eaters — McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane,” one of her aides observes. “Real military guys, not these retired three-stars who go into civilian jobs.”
“There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s more muscular brand of American foreign policy is better matched to 2016 than it was to 2008,” said Jake Sullivan, her top policy adviser at the State Department, who plays the same role in her campaign.
It was De­cem­ber 2015, 53 days before the Iowa caucuses, and Sullivan was sitting down with me in Clinton’s sprawling Brooklyn headquarters to explain how she was shaping her message for a campaign suddenly dominated by concerns about national security. Clinton’s strategy, he said, was twofold: Explain to voters that she had a clear plan for confronting the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, and expose her Republican opponents as utterly lacking in experience or credibility on national security.
There were good reasons for Clinton to let her inner hawk fly. After the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., Americans’ concern about a major attack on the nation spiked. A CNN/ORC poll taken after Paris showed that a majority, 53 percent, favored sending ground troops to Iraq or Syria, a remarkable shift from the war-weary sentiment that prevailed during most of Obama’s presidency. The Republican candidates were reaching for apocalyptic metaphors to demonstrate their resolve. Ted Cruz threatened to carpet-bomb the Islamic State to test whether desert sand can glow; Donald Trump called for the United States to ban all Muslims from entering the country “until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses.”
Yet such spikes in the public appetite for mili­tary action tend to be transitory. Three weeks later, the same poll showed an even split, at 49 percent, on whether to deploy troops. Neither Trump nor Cruz favors major new deployments of American soldiers to Iraq and Syria (nor, for that matter, does Clinton). If anything, both are more skeptical than Clinton about intervention and more circumspect than she about maintaining the nation’s post-World War II military commitments. Trump loudly proclaims his opposition to the Iraq War. He wants the United States to spend less to underwrite NATO and has talked about withdrawing the American security umbrella from Asia, even if that means Japan and South Korea would acquire nuclear weapons to defend themselves. Cruz, unlike Clinton, opposed aiding the Syrian rebels in 2014. He once supported Pentagon budget constraints advocated by his isolationist colleague, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Thus might the gen­eral election present voters with an unfamiliar choice: a Democratic hawk versus a Republican reluctant warrior.
To thwart the progressive insurgency of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Clinton carefully calibrated her message during the Democratic primaries to align herself closely with Barack Obama and his racially diverse coalition. But as she pivots to the general election, that balancing act with Obama will become trickier. “There’s going to be a huge amount of interest in the press to score-keep,” Sullivan says. “It just so easily can become a sport that distracts from her ability to make an affirmative case.”
In showing her stripes as a prospective commander in chief, Clinton will no doubt draw heavily upon her State Department experience — filtering the lessons she learned in Libya, Syria and Iraq into the sinewy worldview she has held since childhood. Last fall, in a series of policy speeches, Clinton began limning distinctions with the president on national security. She said the United States should consider sending more special-operations troops to Iraq than Obama had committed, to help the Iraqis and Kurds fight the Islamic State. She came out in favor of a partial no-fly zone over Syria. And she described the threat posed by ISIS to Americans in starker terms than he did. As is often the case with Clinton and Obama, the differences were less about direction than degree. She wasn’t calling for ground troops in the Middle East, any more than he was. Clinton insisted her plan was not a break with his, merely an “intensification and acceleration” of it.
It’s an open question how well Clinton’s hawkish instincts match the country’s mood. Americans are weary of war and remain suspicious of foreign entanglements. And yet, after the retrenchment of the Obama years, there is polling evidence that they are equally dissatisfied with a portrait of their country as a spent force, managing its decline amid a world of rising powers like China, resurgent empires like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and lethal new forces like the Islamic State. If Obama’s minimalist approach was a necessary reaction to the maximalist style of his predecessor, then perhaps what Americans yearn for is something in between — the kind of steel-belted pragmatism that Clinton has spent a lifetime honing.
“The president has made some tough decisions,” says Leon Panetta, who served as Obama’s defense secretary after Bob Gates, and as director of the C.I.A. before David Petraeus. “But it’s been a mixed record, and the concern is, the president defining what America’s role in the world is in the 21st century hasn’t happened.
“Hopefully, he’ll do it,” he added, acknowledging the time Obama has left. “Certainly, she would.”

The Scarlet Woman WILL Press the Button (Revelation 17:4)

LETTER: Keep Hillary’s fingers away from nuclear button

App.com

8:07 a.m. EDT April 8, 2016

(Photo: AP)

During the Cold War, U.S. policy was to avert a nuclear war with the former Soviet Union. Even when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest, Hungary, in 1956 to smash a rebellion by Hungarian freedom fighters, the U.S. did not intervene. Recently however, Hillary Clinton stated that as president of the United States she would not hesitate to shoot down Russian war planes if they violated a “no fly zone in Syria.”

As the U.S. senator from New York, Clinton has now admitted that she was wrong to vote in favor of former President G.W. Bush’s unjust war in Iraq. That war resulted in 39,000 brave Americans killed or wounded, billions of taxpayers’ dollars wasted, destabilization of the Middle East, suffering for millions of Iraqis and the present persecution of Christians.

As secretary of state in the Obama administration, Clinton was very much involved in initiating a civil war in Libya, the assassination of its leader Muammar Gaddafi and leaving our embassy in Benghazi, Libya, unprotected. Her apparent annoyance and callous indifference when she appeared at a televised Senate hearing to answer questions relating to the death of our Libyan ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three members of his staff was shameful and cruel. She demonstrated a lack of integrity and capability.

Clinton as president of the United States and commander in chief of our armed forces, with her fingers on the nuclear button, would be a disaster for the U.S. and the entire world.

Scarlet Woman Takes Huge Lead (Rev 17:4)

Clinton sweeps Super Tuesday 2.0 as Sanders concedes Missouri 
Press Trust of India | Washington Mar 18, 2016 05:57 AM IST

Hillary Clinton has taken big strides toward securing the Democratic nomination by winning all five primaries in a multi-state vote for US presidential poll after her rival Senator Bernie Sanders conceded defeat in keenly-contested Missouri.

Sanders, who was trailing by just 1500 votes in the Missouri primary elections on Tuesday, said he would not request for recounting of votes and has conceded defeat to Clinton.

“I prefer to save the taxpayers of Missouri some money,” Sanders said through spokesman Michael Briggs yesterday.

The 68-year-old former Secretary of State has swept the ‘Super Tuesday 2.0’ by bagging Florida and North Carolina while also posting crucial victories over Sanders in the industrial Midwest by taking Ohio and Illinois.

Results of the Republican presidential primary in Missouri is yet to be officially declared as it is too close to call. Front-runner Donald Trump is leading his rival Senator Ted Cruz by 1700 votes. So far, Cruz has not conceded defeat.

Since the margin of victory in each case is less than one percentage point, CNN and other US networks said they will not project a winner in either contest.

Missouri saw more than 1.5 million ballots, or 39 per cent of registered voters, cast on Tuesday. That was the highest amount recorded for a Presidential primary in Missouri history. The previous record of 1.4 million, or 36 per cent, was set during the 2008 primary.

Missouri went to polls along with the key states of Florida, Illinois, North Carolina and Ohio

The Scarlet Woman Takes A Huge Lead (Revelation 17:4)

Hillary Clinton Wins Four States, Adding to Delegate Lead

By Laura Meckler and Colleen McCain Nelson

Updated March 16, 2016 9:56 a.m. ET 

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.—Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton won critical presidential primaries in the industrial Midwest and completed her sweep of the South on Tuesday, as she took full command of a contest that has been far more competitive than expected at the start.
Rival Bernie Sanders was still hoping to win in Missouri, where the result was too close to call. But even a Missouri win for Mr. Sanders seemed nowhere near enough to change the dynamic of the race. Mrs. Clinton won in Ohio, Illinois, Florida and North Carolina, and blunted Mr. Sanders’s momentum from a win last week in Michigan. She widened her already formidable delegate lead and made it improbable he can catch up.

“We are moving close to securing the Democratic Party nomination and winning this election in November,” the former secretary of state and New York senator told cheering supporters in Florida, boasting that she has won more votes than any candidate in either party.

She took a swipe at Mr. Sanders, saying he should be more specific about his plans, but she lodged a wholesale indictment of Republican front-runner Donald Trump. “When we hear a candidate for president call for rounding up 12 million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture—that doesn’t make him strong. It makes him wrong,” she said.
With 214 pledged delegates at stake, Florida was the night’s biggest prize, while Illinois had 156 pledged delegates and Ohio 143 up for grabs. They will be awarded proportionally.

Heading into Tuesday, Mr. Sanders was ramping up his attacks on Mrs. Clinton, and has vowed to fight all the way to the summer convention. But he may now face increasing pressure to back off and revert to his earlier role as a candidate primarily driving a progressive, populist message rather than pursuing a viable path to the nomination.

At his election night rally in Arizona Tuesday night, though, Mr. Sanders showed no signs of backing off. He pointed to Wall Street contributions to the super PAC supporting Mrs. Clinton and repeated his call that she release transcripts of her high-priced speeches to Wall Street firms.

“To my mind, if you’re going to give a speech for $225,000 it must be a really great speech,” he said. “And if it’s such a great speech, all of America should be able to read it.”

In a statement issued late into the night, Mr. Sanders said the race was still winnable.

“With more than half the delegates yet to be chosen and a calendar that favors us in the weeks and months to come, we remain confident that our campaign is on a path to win the nomination,” he said.
With nearly all precincts counted, Mrs. Clinton topped Mr. Sanders 64.5% to 33.3% in Florida, by 54.6% to 40.8% in North Carolina and by 56.5% to 42.8% in Ohio.

In Illinois, her margin was much closer, some 50.3% to 48.9% with 98% of precincts reporting.
Mrs. Clinton had been expected to easily win Florida, with the state’s demographics and rules barring independents from participating helping her. But Ohio was closely fought, and Mr. Sanders had hoped to parlay a victory last week in Michigan to the neighboring state. Both have seen a drain in manufacturing jobs, and Mr. Sanders put the blame squarely on free-trade agreements that Mrs. Clinton has long supported.

Mrs. Clinton completed a sweep of the South, where strong support from African-Americans pumped up her totals. But her Ohio win was more important, showing she could win in the industrial Midwest.

After Tuesday’s vote, Mrs. Clinton was assured of adding at least 253 delegates to her column, bringing her total pledged delegates, who are chosen by the voters, to more than 1,000. Mr. Sanders was sure to add at least 124 delegates, but he was on track to end the night more than 300 delegates behind. Including superdelegates, who can vote for any candidate they like, her total topped 1,400, more than double his.

At roughly the halfway point of the race, Sanders advisers say they now have the advantage, with friendlier states set later in the calendar. His campaign now looks ahead to contests next week in Arizona, Utah and Idaho, three states where aides have hoped to do well. But the next big delegate hauls aren’t awarded until April: first in Wisconsin, and then the giant prize of New York, where Mrs. Clinton lives and which she represented in the Senate for eight years.

ENLARGE

In Florida, Mrs. Clinton’s advantage was on display Tuesday in Miami, home to large populations of Hispanic and African-American voters who have gravitated to her campaign.

“I like that she’s a smart, charismatic woman,” said Bridgette Thornton, a 37-year-old African-American attorney, who cast her ballot at a Miami church. “It was a difficult choice for me, but I’m a practical person. Hillary has a better shot at winning the presidential election.”

The race was closer in Ohio, where Mr. Sanders hammered his anti-free-trade views in recent days. Mrs. Clinton tried to recast her trade message, but the attempt fell flat with at least some voters.
“The Clinton history with trade policies, that really just killed our area,” said Fred Woke, a 57-year-old radio announcer who voted for Mr. Sanders in Niles, in northeastern Ohio.

The question now is what tone Mr. Sanders will adopt in coming days. In the leadup to Tuesday’s contests, the Vermont senator targeted Mrs. Clinton’s record of support for free-trade deals, and for the backing she receives from an outside super PAC.

2016 Primary, Caucus Results

Earlier in the race, Mr. Sanders vowed to avoid negative attacks, but he has amped up his critique in the weeks since voting began. On the stump leading into Tuesday’s voting, he suggested Mrs. Clinton is in the pocket of Wall Street and connected her support for free-trade agreements to an exodus of manufacturing jobs across the Midwest.

The challenge for both Democrats is that Mr. Trump, should he win the Republican nomination, would be an unconventional opponent who could pick up some of Mr. Sanders’s populist arguments.
That has some Clinton backers anxious for Mr. Sanders to ease up. “The message of Sanders campaign has become personal attacks,” said Robert Zimmerman, a superdelegate from New York who backs Mrs. Clinton. “It’s not only wrong, it’s dangerous politically if he keeps up that tone. It could hurt plans for party unity and empower Republicans.”

Steve Elmendorf, a political consultant who backs Mrs. Clinton, agreed there will come a point when Mr. Sanders needs to let up, but he said it isn’t for Clinton supporters to say when. “When it becomes clear you cannot win, then you should unite behind the nominee of the party and try to beat the Republicans,” Mr. Elmendorf said. “It’s for him to decide when he can’t win.”

In 2008, Mrs. Clinton herself continued to compete in presidential-primary contests against then-Sen. Barack Obama even though he remained ahead in the delegate race the entire time.

“Even if he doesn’t think he will win the nomination, he’s trying to amass as many delegates as he can,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist. Delegates would give Mr. Sanders leverage at the party’s convention and demonstrate the strength of his movement, Mr. Trippi said, adding, “I don’t see him relenting.”

Sanders aides see a narrow path to the nomination to the nomination and say the senator will continue to fight for it. His fervent supporters, who continue to fill arenas, also hope he presses forward. “I think that you need to fight the fight ’til the end,” said Cindy Figh, 50, a massage therapist from Lithia, Fla., who shaved the name “Bernie” into her hair and came to see the senator speak last week in Tampa. “I just think that there’s a chance that he can pull it off.”

She rejected any suggestion that Mr. Sanders might damage Mrs. Clinton, whom she plans to support if she wins the nomination. “I think that this is part of politics,” Ms. Figh said. “We’re in the big-boy playground now, and sometimes your ball gets taken away.”

Steve Schale, a Democratic consultant in Florida who voted for Mrs. Clinton, said he doesn’t worry that the Sanders attacks will damage her, partly because Democrats are sure to unify if Mr. Trump is the nominee. “You want to get Democrats over the Sanders-Clinton thing, give them five seconds to think about Trump being within five feet of the nuclear codes,” Mr. Schale said.

He said he saw no mathematical way for Mr. Sanders to overcome Mrs. Clinton’s delegate lead, and said a protracted primary fight would occupy time that the Clinton campaign could be using to prepare for the general election.