Hillary Clinton issued a call to strengthen America’s international alliances and commitment to “defeating terrorism” in the wake of Thursday’s terrorist attack in Nice, France that left at least 84 dead.
“Every American stands in strong solidarity with the people of France, and we say with one voice: we will not be intimidated,” Clinton said in a statement. “We will never allow terrorists to undermine the egalitarian and democratic values that underpin our very way of life. This cowardly attack only strengthens our commitment to our alliance and to defeating terrorism around the world.”
The former secretary of state expanded on her approach in a Thursday night phone interview on Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor,” pointing to singular attacks on civilians as proof that we’re fighting “a different kind of war.”
While Clinton declined to answer O’Reilly’s question about issuing a formal declaration of war against the Islamic State, she repeatedly used the word to describe the effort to defeat the terror group.
“We’ve got to do more to understand that this is a war against these terrorist groups, the radical jihadist groups,” she said.
Clinton proposed modernizing NATO to better prepare for future terrorist attacks, accelerating the coordination of intelligence sharing between countries, and avoiding playing into ISIL’s hands by sending American troops into Iraq or Syria.
Instead, she said, “We’ve got to go after their headquarters. We have to keep pushing them into a smaller and smaller territory so that we can take out their leadership, take out their infrastructure.”
Clearly, it was.
It was wonton murder, a sign of desperation. Such people cannot take over the world, because almost every man, woman, and child ever born is horrified by such behavior.
Donald, on the other hand, claims these people are winning. For him, aggression works, and therefore they are succeeding. He says the way to stop them is to make government more powerful, more aggressive. To let bureaucrats intrude more into people’s lives, so they can know what we’re all doing, and determine if we’re doing the right thing.
Terrorism is one of those problems where the brave, noble thing is also the best, most practical option. Becoming an authoritarian police state will bring less security, not more. We’d be throwing away our values for nothing.
Indeed. Russia used the authoritarian method counterproductively for decades. I have wondered whether the lack of terrorist problems in Russia in recent years is because Putin has been paying them to attack elsewhere.
This is what ‘terror’ truly is. It is the most vulgar and inhumane of all tactics.
Hillary’s approach sounds about right to me. Dummy bush got us into this mess with his wannabe cowboy ways and that simple yet foolish mistake has brought on all this and gained nothing.
We have smart TV’s and phones now, we shouldn’t be fighting a dumb war.
America hasn’t issued a formal declaration of war since December 1941. That isn’t how we go to war anymore. O’Reilly knows that such a formal declaration means we actually have to fight until a defined enemy is defeated. We could beat Isis militarily in a few days, but that would just make things worse. They would just return to fighting an insurgency and we would be bled further.
We need leaders with some smarts. Slogans don’t get 'er done in the middle east.
If we ever declare war on Isis, we have done what Isis wants us to do.