Is Hillary Clinton really the foreign policy super-hawk she is portrayed to be?

[Bill USA]

Hillary "the Bitch for War" is an oft repeated meme here. Here's a good article from Vox.com (once again, we find the NYT promoting dim-witted anti-Hillary Bullshit):

Is Hillary Clinton really the foreign policy super-hawk she is portrayed to be?(emhasis my own)

Late on Thursday, the New York Times magazine published a lengthy profile of Hillary Clinton under an illustration of her as a toy soldier and the headline "How Hillary Clinton Became a Hawk."

The profile, by Mark Landler, traces her evolution on foreign policy, explores her legacy as secretary of state, and seeks to deduce a Clinton worldview. It's fascinating, deeply reported, and well worth reading. It also reiterates what is perhaps the defining piece of conventional wisdom about Hillary Clinton and foreign policy: she is a super-hawk.

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A few hours after the piece went online, something else was published comparing the presidential candidates on foreign policy. And the story it told could not have been more different.[/font]

It was a simple scorecard, assembled by a non-partisan nuclear nonproliferation group called Global Zero, comparing the five remaining candidates on a battery of eight foreign policy issues.

[font size="3"]On every issue that Global Zero measured, Clinton is indicated as far less hawkish than all three of the Republican candidates, and as basically tied with Bernie Sanders.[/font] She supports the Iran nuclear deal; the Republicans all oppose it. She supports using diplomacy to solve the North Korean nuclear crisis; John Kasich is the only Republican to do so. She supports negotiating with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons; no Republican candidate does.
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[DFab420]

1. Um this is focused specifically on nuclear non-proliferation. This has nothing to do with her

comfort level of using military force, coups and bombing other countries.

Nor does it speak to her comfort level of selling massive amounts of weapons to countries with abysmal human rights records like Saudi Arabia.

[DURHAM D]

2. All the men on my TV say she is.

Sort of makes me wonder what they are so afraid of as they are not being rational.

[TheFarseer]

3. We're you hoping no one would click on the link?

I was expecting a scorecard like "supported action in Libya" "supported action in Iraq" "supports the F-35" I was not expecting a bunch of nuclear weapons questions that no one is talking about and half the republicans have question marks probably because no one has asked that question the whole campaign.

[Bill USA]

14. no. I was HOPING that people would read the entire article. It goes into more ...check this excerpt

Conventional wisdom holds, for example, that Clinton pushed hard for arming Syria's rebels, something Clinton herself now suggests. But contemporary accounts tell a more modest story. The Wall Street Journal's Adam Entous, in an exhaustive 2013 story on the administration's Syria debates the previous year, wrote that CIA Director David Petraeus mostly pushed for arming Syrian rebels. Clinton, he writes, "spoke in favor of the initiative but her remarks were brief." She "didn't in the end aggressively push for the initiative."

So it is difficult to say whether Clinton would substantially alter American strategy on its ongoing intervention against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But it seems much safer to conclude that, in dealing with adversarial states from Iran to China to North Korea, she would emphasize diplomacy and multilateralism over confrontation and unilateralism. It is difficult to square these policies with the conventional wisdom of Clinton as a super-hawk.

Measuring foreign policy is uniquely difficult

Unlike with domestic policy, where candidates can lay out an all-encompassing plan and make specific promises about how, say, health care would work under that plan, we understand that this is just not possible on foreign policy, that no candidate can make specific promises about global affairs over a four-to-eight-year span.

This is because whereas the US government can at least nominally control domestic policy outright, international affairs is a realm largely beyond American control. It's also because domestic policy is much easier to plan for — people will get sick and require health care; kids will enter school age and require education — whereas foreign policy is more about responding to unforeseen events, so a president's most important decisions are often how they respond in a crisis.

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[Skwmom]

4. Tied with Bernie Sanders? I laughed out loud.

[Baobab]

12. I wonder where the title for her book "Hard Choices" came from?

Was it Madeline Albright's comment about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children ?

[Kall]

5. Damn that NYT.

They sure are a nefarious bunch of bastards, endorsing Hillary and then promoting anti-Hillary bullshit to sabotage her.

Yes, she is. She evidently learned nothing from Operation Fucking Disaster in Iraq, since her emails revealed that her staff was highly enthusiastic, celebratory and congratulating her that she had succeeded in her extensive efforts to convince Obama to participate in overthrowing the government of Libya. I'm guessing the women of Libya will be receiving no gender cards in the mail.

[jfern]

6. She's definitely a hawk

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/10/30/1442802/-Make-no-mistake-A-vote-for-Hillary-is-a-vote-for-war

[Lazy Daisy]

7. YES

[JaneyVee]

8. Here's her Iraq War speech:

[Armstead]

10. Hey I've got this great bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you cheap.

[JaneyVee]

11. You can look it up. Its public info.

[Kall]

13. If she was fool enough not to know what that vote was

then she has no business being President. The 100,000+ people marching in the streets knew exactly what it was. Bush and Cheney were practically giving speeches dressed in desert fatigues.

[Armstead]

9. The general conclusion of the article is "Maybe...Maybe Not. It's too complicated."

Hardly a definitive repudiation of anything.

[sadoldgirl]

15. If the WH has to come out against her

"no-fly zone" proposal, that proves that she is,imo.