Paul Pillar, of Georgetown University and formerly the CIA, tells the NY Times: "I think the conventional wisdom, that Hillary Clinton is a more hawkish person and would be a more hawkish president, with everything that adjective implies, is correct."
I believe Pillar is correct. So you can work backward to my agreement with conventional wisdom, which, notwithstanding John Kenneth Galbraith's guffawing at its stupidity, is in fact sometimes wise. In its application to Hillary and hawkishness, however, it seems more obvious than anything else. One needn't be wise — just conscious — to know of her alarming senatorial tenacity when it came to the monstrous misdeed of the Iraq war, followed, as President Obama's secretary of state, by her urging "the administration to join a NATO-led coalition to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya," by proposing "that more forces be left in Iraq," and by pushing "to funnel arms to moderate Syrian rebels."
Is there some mystery, some ambiguity, some cryptic something-or-other about Hillary's muscular inclinations that I'm missing? It seems to me the burden of proof is on Hillary's supporters to disabuse her detractors of their empirically founded fears; accordingly, her detractors are relieved of the obligation to "prove" that which is fearful. It's all right there, there in the record.
Reconfirming that record is former Obama adviser Dennis Ross (now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy), who reflects: "Both when she was secretary of state and since, she has had a sense of focusing not just on the cost of action, but the cost of inaction. President Obama has been much more inclined to the cost of action versus the cost of inaction."
In my view, President Obama has been right to do so, and Hillary — especially in Near Eastern matters, which is to say, the Middle East — has been wrong. The Iraq war was a self-evident calamity before it even commenced, and yet Hillary refused to disown her supportive decision until just recently. "Libya is now a mess," as Martin O'Malley correctly observed last Saturday night; "more [U.S.] forces … left in Iraq" (which was never realistic) would have only exposed more U.S. forces in Iraq; and funneling arms to Syria's handful of moderate rebels would have only accomplished the funneling of more arms to Syria's thousands of radicals. Where Obama has outweighed the cost of inaction, such as in Afghanistan, the result has been, let's say, less than fetching.
Is it, then, unreasonable to object to Hillary's candidacy, what with its empirical, presidential promise of more muscular engagements? The question is often framed cleverly: How can you (that being I) object to Hillary's candidacy when any Republican alternative is far worse? But that, in its cleverness, is also a nonsensical question. In the real world there is no Republican alternative (thank God), thus a nominated Clinton is as good as a President Clinton. I accept that, for I live in the real world. And so my objection means nothing, although objections to my objection reflect something quite objectionable to me: Let's everybody leap on the bandwagon and root root root for the inevitable home team. That I object to almost as much as Hillary's candidacy, however impotent my twofold objections may be.