Hillary: intensify our military actions against ISIS; no fly zone
Q: In 2012, you took a more hawkish stand on Syria than President Obama. What is your strategy now for ending the Syrian civil war and uprooting ISIS?
A: Well, Trudy, you're right. I have been focused on this and speaking out against this for a long time, and when I was still secretary of state, I joined within then-Gen. [David] Petraeus, director of the CIA, and Leon Panetta, secretary of defense, to present a plan to try and do more to support the opposition to Assad because I feared then, that if Assad followed through on what seemed to be his approach, by basically calling everyone that opposed him a terrorist, that we would end up with real live terrorists in a lot of foreign sectors inside Syria. And indeed, you know so well that has happened.
I think we have to continue to work as hard as we can to try push a political solution, and that means getting the opposition, such as they are, to the table, but I am not at this moment, optimistic, I have a great deal of respect for the UN negotiator, Staffan de Mistura, who is conducting these negotiations, but I think we are going to have to have to work on two tracks at the same time... continue the diplomatic efforts but to intensify our military actions against ISIS. I have said repeatedly: number one, we need to have a very robust air coalition to take out their infrastructure, their leadership, take out their headquarters and the like. We need to continue to look for a way to impose a no-fly zone and my answer to people who say, "Well, the Russians would never believe that," is to say, "How do you know if you don't negotiate it?" My thinking today is it is actually more likely to happen now, for reasons of Russia's own assessment, than it was in the past, even though I believe then I would have a chance to get that accomplished.
I want a no-fly zone, in part to try to find safe zone for those fighters, Arab and Kurdish fighters, I want to train and equip them, they have proven their willingness to go after ISIS fighters. I want safe zones so that refugees can stay in Syria and not add to the horrible refugee crisis we are facing. I want us to continue to support the Kurdish and Arab fighters in Syria with special forces, I want to continue to support our efforts to train and help direct the Iraqi army. They were successful in Ramadi, they're going to have to eventually take on ISIS in Mosul. We have about 4,000 American soldiers there now, who are doing training an equipped mission. We have included in there special forces, helping to call in air strikes, helping to demonstrate and lead some of the action inside Iraq and they are in Syria. I think it is also important that we keep pushing Muslim majority nations to be part of this fight, now there's a preoccupation with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and Yemen. But they need to be more involved in our efforts against ISIS as well. And I think we need fight ISIS from the air and support those fighting from the ground, the Kurds in my opinion, despite objections from Turkey and others, but we also have to keep Iran and Russia from going any further than they already have in support of ISIS. And we have to take on and defeat ISIS online, you know they are sophisticated savvy user of the internet where they recruit, where they radicalize, where the plot and they plan, and we can't let them have the entire internet to do that. And just let me quickly add, it is important that we do everything we can, working with our partners to make them safer from ISIS attacks, and we've got to get our European friends to more of what we have learned we have to do. The EU needs to more with the sharing of intelligence, passport information, border crossing, and I worked on this when I was secretary of state, we wanted their airline manifest and passport information, which we were eventually able to get because we need their intelligence information to keep us safe in America from potential terrorist attacks. I have a very broad comprehensive approach about how best to defeat ISIS, how to deal with what the situation is currently is in Syria is what I am going to currently advocate.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20160412_What_Hillary_Clinton_told_The_Inquirer.html#hiB3WojIEjq74Wgw.99
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