Sunday, January 6, 2008

Shrillary's Big Problem: The "Toughness" Issue

Here's why, imho, she's not a good choice(via Raw Story):
"{Hillary seems to raise possibility of nuking terrorist 'safe havens'"

Clinton promises 'heavy retaliation' for terrorist-harboring nations

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, finding herself in an unexpectedly close race with freshman Sen. Barack Obama, flexed her national security muscles in Saturday night's Democratic debate, raising the possibility of loosing nuclear weapons on countries that harbor terrorists who plot a nuclear attack on the US.

Clinton, answering a hypothetical question about the possibility of a nuclear weapon being detonated in the US, said she would immediately target terrorist "safe havens." The former First Lady warned "every state in the world must know we will retaliate," and she invoked deterrence aimed at the Soviet Union during the Cold War -- predicated on mutually assured destruction resulting from a US nuclear counter-strike -- as a successful strategy for averting a nuclear catastrophe.

ABC News anchor Charles Gibson, who was moderating Saturday night's Facebook-cosponsored debate, asked the candidates to imagine questions they would face the day after a nuclear weapon was detonated in a major US citiy. What will we wish we had done, and what will you as president do? Gibson asked the candidates.

Although she did not deliberately say she would launch nuclear weapons at countries where terrorists were believed to have found safe haven, her answer left it as a clear probability.

"If we can demonstrate that the people responsible for planning the nuclear attack on our country may not themselves be in a government or associated with a state, but have a haven within one, then every state in the world must know we will retaliate against those states," Clinton said. "There cannot be safe havens for stateless terrorists who are in these networks that are plotting to have the proliferation of nuclear weapons ... that could cause such havoc. So I think we have to be very, very clear: Deterrence worked during the Cold War in large measure because the United States made it clear to the Soviet Union that there would be massive retaliation. We have to make it clear to those states that would give safe have to stateless terrorists that would launch a nuclear attack against America, that they would also face very heavy retaliation."

That's the biggest danger Shrillary poses: That, to rebut any critique that she is/will be 'too weak' (too female, i.e.) to confront our "enemies," she'll get railroaded into some stupid move like heaving nukes around. She'll have an incentive to prove herself "able" to "go to war." It is way too likely, especially in the highly-charged conditions which will prevail when (if) the Bushies actually leave.

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