The three Democratic presidential candidates pledged during their recent debate to lead the United States in the fight to crush the Islamic State terrorist group, with each suggesting that the Obama administration has come up short.
In the debate broadcast on Nov. 14 by CBS, the candidates eagerly embraced increasing U.S. engagement and called for the absolute defeat of the terrorist group in the wake of its terrorist attacks in Paris the previous night.
Implicit in the pledges were critiques of Obama administration policy in the face of the rise of ISIS, which critics have described as feckless and deferential to other world powers fighting the group.
“We have to look at ISIS as the leading threat of an international terror network,” said campaign front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“It cannot be contained, it must be defeated,” the former secretary of state said. “There is no question in my mind that if we summon our resources, both our leadership resources and all of the tools at our disposal, not just military force, which should be used as a last resort, but our diplomacy, our development aid, law enforcement, sharing of intelligence in a much more open and cooperative way, that we can bring people together.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who trails Clinton but has developed a stronger campaign than many observers anticipated, agreed that the United States must lead the fight against ISIS. But he also launched a broadside against moderate Muslims, saying they must step up in the battle.
“We have to understand that the Muslim nations in the region — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, all of these nations — they’re going to just have to get their hands dirty, their boots on the ground,” Sanders said at the event at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, the first caucus state in the primary season. “They are going to have to take on ISIS. This is a war for the soul of Islam.”
The hawkish posture embraced by Sanders was unusual in a race in which he has mostly targeted Clinton from the left, primarily on income gap and banking reforms.
Sanders and the third candidate on the stage, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, took shots at Clinton for her involvement in policies enacted during the Obama administration and under the presidency of George W. Bush that led to the unraveling of the Middle East. Clinton was Obama’s secretary of state in his first term, and as the senator from New York when Bush was in power, she voted in 2002 to approve using military force in Iraq. — jta