The Democrats' Hawk

Why can't Hillary Clinton be more like Rand Paul or Donald Trump? I am not kidding, at least when it comes to Syria. More like Bernie Sanders would be okay, too. To one extent or another, all three are bucking the current candidate trend toward diving deeper into a ghastly civil war.

The former secretary of state's call for a "no-fly" zone crystallized a truth that can no longer be buried, much as liberals would rather avoid thinking about it because they like so much else about her: Clinton really is more hawkish than President Barack Obama. She would be a president more open than he is to military intervention, with all the lost lives, huge expenses and unanticipated consequences that entails.

You have only to consider the U.S. bombing raid on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan to once again be reminded of how things can go tragically wrong – whether it's an entire section of the globe in violent upheaval or patients "burning in their beds," as one Doctors Without Borders nurse put it, in one building in one Afghan city.

And this is happening under a president who has been so sparing in his use of military force that almost every Republican trying to be president is vowing that by God, when they take the helm, America – the strong, the mighty, the international savior of first resort – will be back.

Clinton is not on that page, but she is not on Obama's, either. She lost the 2008 nomination to him in part because as a senator from New York, she voted to authorize the use of military force against Iraq. Obama ran as a staunch opponent of that war, bolstered by a prophetic speech he made at a 2002 rally when he was still an Illinois state senator and the war had not yet begun.

As his secretary of state, Clinton went on to push for air strikes in Libya to head off what then Defense Secretary Robert Gates called "large-scale slaughter" by leader Moammar Gadhafi. Obama eventually agreed to limited action for a limited time in conjunction with the international community. "The United States is not going to deploy ground troops into Libya. And we are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal – specifically, the protection of civilians in Libya," he said.

Former Sen. Richard Lugar, then the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that "I personally don't think we should be engaged in a Libyan civil war." Even Gates had misgivings, saying on TV that Libya was not a vital U.S. interest.

But still we and our allies went in, set up a "no-fly" zone to protect civilians from Gadhafi's air power, and once again appeared blindsided by the results. Gadhafi fell, chaos ensued among rebel factions, and four U.S. citizens including our ambassador were murdered in Benghazi.

Now Clinton wants a "no-fly" zone in Syria, she told WHDH TV in Boston last week, "to try to stop the carnage on the ground and from the air, to try to provide some way ... to stem the flow of refugees." Contrast that with Sanders, who says a no-fly zone "could get us more deeply involved in that horrible civil war and lead to a never-ending U.S. entanglement in that region." It's an even worse idea now that Russia has started bombing targets in Syria. Do we really want to have to shoot down a Russian jet in a "no-fly" zone, or even come close?

Obama says Clinton might make different decisions if she ends up in the Oval Office. But primary voters can't count on that, and generally speaking, they are a noninterventionist bunch. A Pew Research Center poll in July found that 63 percent of Democrats oppose the use of U.S. ground forces against Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria and 57 percent said they were concerned the U.S. would "go too far" in trying to stop them.

Trump and Paul are exceptions in their aggressively hawkish party and field. Trump has said more than once that the United States should let the Russians have at it in Syria and own the inevitable disaster. But it's Paul, the Kentucky senator, who seems to have best grasped the lessons of the past. "Sometimes both sides of the civil war are evil, and sometimes intervention sometimes makes us less safe," Paul said in the Sept. 16 debate. "This is real the debate we have to have in the Middle East. Every time we have toppled a secular dictator, we have gotten chaos, the rise of radical Islam and we're more at risk."

Even though Obama predicted with eerie accuracy in 2002 what would happen if the United States invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein, he repeated the error in Libya. He is trying to get it right in Syria, despite enormous pressure from Republicans and some Democrats to wade ever deeper into the swamp.

That resistance is a kind of strength, but Obama doesn't get much credit for it. Those of us who like his caution should appreciate it while we can. The odds of another president like him are slim – unless this issue turns out to be as important to Democrats in 2016 as it was in 2008, and Sanders somehow pulls an Obama.