Former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden told Newsmax on Thursday he believes Hillary Clinton would do a better job as president fighting the Islamic State (ISIS) than Barack Obama.
To be honest, my straightforward answer is, yes," Hayden said in response to a question on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
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Hayden, also a retired four-star Air Force general, said Clinton, who is mulling a run for the 2016 Democratic nomination, has been more candid about the nature of the terror groups and their roots in radical Islam.
"She just said this was religiously motivated, which is something that the guys down the street from me [at the White House] right now worked very hard to avoid saying," Hayden said.
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She did talk about the caliphate and connect it to Islam, Hayden said.
At a Silicon Valley conference for women on Tuesday, Clinton dismissed the idea of putting American or Western troops on the ground to battle ISIS, and instead using “air force, but also army soldiers from the region, and particularly from Iraq,"
Politico reported.
Hayden said the United States has made some progress in the war against ISIS, but not nearly enough.
"We're punishing them in Iraq and Syria … but it certainly isn't a massive rollback of their game and that's going to have to follow," he said.
"It's now likeminded groups that are grabbing the brand and popping up in places like Libya and the Sinai in Egypt and maybe even Boko Haram in Nigeria."
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