To hear Bernie Sanders tell it, Hillary Clinton is too hawkish for Democratic voters. Clinton voted for the Iraq War and favored bombing Libya. She may be experienced, Sanders recently admitted, but “Dick Cheney had a lot of experience,” too.

As she makes her closing case to the anti-war Iowa liberals who rejected her in 2008, Clinton is calibrating her message to deflect those charges. Though she has long stressed her toughness against foreign adversaries, Clinton is now spotlighting her role as a peacemaker.


As secretary of state, Clinton was "leading the diplomacy that keeps us out of war,” explains an ad released by her campaign last week, as footage appears of Clinton being applauded by United Nations diplomats. The ad also cites her role in brokering a November 2012 cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, a relatively little-noted chapter of her State Department tenure.

At a Democratic candidates’ forum in Des Moines on Monday night, Clinton — speaking soon after Sanders reminded voters yet again of her 2002 Iraq vote — pressed her peacemaker credentials, recounting her role in talks that led to the Iran nuclear deal and explaining her efforts to avert a wider war in Gaza.

“So the Israelis are telling me, ‘Look, we’ve got to go back in. We have to have a ground invasion again in Gaza,’” Clinton said. “I’m saying, no, please, don’t do that. Let’s try to figure out, how do we resolve it?”

After she shuttled between Jerusalem and Cairo, where Egyptian leaders acted as intermediaries for Hamas, Clinton boasted, "They got a cease-fire. There was no invasion. That’s what you have to do.”

Clinton’s camp argues that she has always talked about both strength and diplomacy. And Clinton has cited her leading role in the Iran nuclear talks and the Gaza cease-fire for months.

But with the Iowa caucuses days away, Clinton is less interested in talking about her support for a no-fly zone in Syria or her hawkish positions in internal Obama Cabinet debates on issues from Afghanistan to Libya.

Even as Clinton plays defense over her Iraq vote — an old but hardly forgotten topic among hard-core Democratic voters — her campaign believes she enjoys an overall advantage in foreign policy duels with Sanders, who is far more comfortable discussing domestic topics like the power of Wall Street banks. In recent days Clinton has targeted Sanders for comments about Iran that she calls naive, including his recent call for "normalizing relations" with Iran, whose overall foreign policy remains antagonistic toward the U.S.

But Clinton faces the risk that Iowa voters know more about her Iraq vote — which Sanders raises nearly every time foreign policy comes up — than about her record as President Barack Obama's top diplomat. Her discussion of diplomatic efforts often seems tailored to defuse fears that she might have an itchy trigger finger as commander in chief. (Clinton's campaign declined to comment for this story.)

On Monday night, Clinton depicted herself as having fended off a potential war with Iran while she worked to advance Obama's nuclear diplomacy. "You cannot imagine how tense it was, because a lot of our friends and partners in the region basically just wanted to end that [nuclear] program by bombing them. 'Just bomb them!'" Clinton said. "I spent a lot of my time explaining to our friends why that was not a good idea."

At the same time, her campaign is mindful of protecting her image of toughness and ensuring that Republicans don't outflank her in a general election on fighting terrorists, standing up to Iran or protecting Israel.

On that front, she has plenty of material to draw from. In Obama White House Situation Room meetings, Clinton was a consistent voice for exercising U.S. military power. She argued for a residual troop presence in Iraq after 2011; backed a larger troop surge for Afghanistan than the one Obama ultimately approved; favored arming Syrian rebels in late 2012, a plan Obama rejected; and argued for the March 2011 U.S. military intervention in Libya.

Sanders has tried to make Clinton pay for that record: "I worry ... that Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive," the Vermont senator said in a mid-December debate. On Monday night, he called the Iraq War "a dumb idea" and noted that "I voted against the war in Iraq ... Hillary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq."

As she makes a closing pitch that emphasizes her foreign policy chops, Clinton tends to gloss over the more hawkish episodes from her past. Asked by an Iowa voter at Monday's forum to place her interventionist instincts on a scale of 1 to 10, for instance, Clinton offered a long riff on her Iran and Gaza efforts.

Finally, Clinton came to the original frame of the question: "I want to make sure I stay as close as possible to non-intervention."

