is the title of Mark Landler’s 4/21/16 NYTimes piece which I’ve butchered for length

 

The reporter’s subhead is:

“Throughout her career she has displayed

instincts on foreign policy that are

more aggressive than those of President

Obama — and most Democrats.”

 

“Hillary and Obama split — namely, on bedrock issues of war and peace, where Clinton’s more (warlike) philosophy

had already collided in unpredictable ways with her boss’s instincts toward restraint.

 

For example, she wants to to send more troops to the Middle East wars.

 

Then-Secy of Defense Gates said admiringly, “This is a tough lady.”.

 

In a crisis with North Korea she strongly urged an aggressive Navy show of force despite

Obama’s hesitation. “We’ve got to run it up the gut!” she told her aides who marveled at her

pugnacity and pro football knowhow.

 

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.”

 

Clinton’s hard line foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature

(WHAT MEANS THIS?) and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.”  

It sets her apart from Obama – and any likely Republican candidate she meets in the general election.

For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, NEITHER TRUMP NOR CRUZ

HAVE DEMONSTRATED ANYWHERE NEAR THE APPETITE FOR MILITARY ENGAGEMENT

ABROAD THAT CLINTON HAS.   (Let’s read that sentence again.)

 

Hillary’s record reveals her decades-long cultivation of the military — especially its high-ranking

commanders, the men with the medals. Her affinity for the armed forces is rooted in a lifelong

belief 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.”  The word is ANY.

 

Unexpectedly, in the bombastic, testosterone-fueled presidential election of 2016, Hillary Clinton

is the last true hawk left in the race.

 

Her father, Hugh Rodham, was a staunch Republican and an anticommunist, and she channeled his views. 

 

She loves the military so much that she claims trying to join the Marines after Yale law school.

She enjoys hanging out with military personnel, kicking back and drinking beer with them.

 

In 2002, when Bush was preparing for war in Iraq, the U.S. general in the area was more of a dove

than the newly elected New York senator. He warned her about the risks of an invasion.

It would be like “kicking over a bee’s nest,” he said.

 

In the Senate Hillary chose to be on the Armed Services committee.  It had long been the preserve

of Republican hawks. But after 9/11, Clinton saw Armed Services as better preparation for her future.

 

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. 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.

Keane is the resident hawk on Fox News.

 

Keane, like Clinton, favored more robust (WATCH THAT ORWELLIAN WORD ROBUST) intervention in Syria than Obama did.

 

In the final days of the Afghanistan debate, Clinton also found herself at odds with her own ambassador

in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry. He, too, held different views than she did on (getting American soldiers killed there). 

He protested that a deeper military involvement in Afghanistan would saddle the United States with

“vastly increased costs and an indefinite, large-scale military role in Afghanistan.”

 

Much of Eikenberry’s analysis proved smart.  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 was furious.

 

“There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton’s more muscular (ORWELL ALERT: 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.

 

There were good reasons for Clinton to let her inner hawk fly. After the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif.,

many Americans favored sending ground troops to Iraq or Syria, a remarkable shift from the war-weary sentiment

that prevailed during most of Obama’s presidency.”

 

LET'S BE CLEAR WHAT WE’RE VOTING FOR