Hillary can't run from the messes she — and Obama — made via @NYPost

Micheal Goidwin

Hillary Clinton’s speech Thursday was billed as her plan to combat the Islamic State. In truth, her plan was to combat the idea that she is another Barack Obama. 

It was a good try, but she failed because, as boxing great Joe Louis once said about an opponent, “He can run, but he can’t hide.” 

Clinton can run from Obama, but can’t hide from the unholy mess he — and she — made. 

As his first secretary of state, she was part of the team that botched the wars in Iraq and Syria and helped birth the Islamic terrorism now rattling the world. The slaughter in Paris and fresh threats against America make it urgent that she erase her fingerprints from the calamity. That’s impossible, so she settled for putting some daylight between herself and Obama. 

“Our goal is not to deter or contain ISIS, but to defeat and destroy ISIS,” she said. 

Daylight, but not too much daylight. For as a Democrat trying to succeed him, she needs Obama’s support, and especially the black vote, to win the general election. 

So she was careful to invoke his name only when she agreed with him, as when she joined him in knocking down the straw man that the solution requires a large deployment of combat troops. 

“Like President Obama, I do not believe that we should again have 100,000 American troops in combat in the Middle East,” she said. 

Nobody on the GOP side advocates that, either, but she had to find something nice to say about Obama. Not an easy thing to do, but necessary for her. 

After all, there’s also the not-so-small matter of the FBI investigation into her mishandling of classified material on her private server. With a wink or a nod, Obama can call off the hunt, or give it the green light. 

It all adds up to a complex minefield, one Clinton couldn’t navigate in a single speech, even though she displayed her knowledge of the issues and players. 

Reading from a teleprompter, she checked off the complications with Turkey, Iran, Russia, the Kurds and the Arab states. She talked about Sunnis and Shias, threw in Hezbollah and Hamas, dropped Osama bin Laden’s name twice and claimed to have warned that the Arab Spring could lead to disaster. 

Take that, Donald Trump! 

Indeed, large parts of the speech seem intended only to show off her experience without actually committing to details that could be dissected. Several times, she looked ready to declare herself, only to stop short on a note of caution. 

She said Vladimir Putin “is actually making things somewhat worse,” before throwing on the brakes to add, “Now, to be clear, though, there is an important role for Russia.” 

At another point, she endorsed Obama’s nonsensical refusal to call Islamic terrorism what it is, saying, “It gives these criminals, these murderers more standing than they deserve.” Then she praised a Muslim man who protected Jews in the kosher-supermarket attack in Paris earlier this year. 

Which is it — is Islam relevant or not? 

One refrain was the need for American leadership, a clear rebuke of Obama’s dereliction, but of course she never mentioned his name in that context. 

“We must lead the world to meet this threat,” she said near the beginning, and soon added, “This is a worldwide fight, and America must lead it.” 

She ended by saying America must resolve that “we will do all we can to lead the world against this threat that threatens people everywhere.” 

That’s the obvious and right message, but each time she said it, another doubt came to mind. Does she mean it? 

There’s the ultimate rub. Clinton has proven herself to be such a stranger to truth that nothing she says can be taken at face value. She’s a political weather vane. 

She’s the one who bragged in 2008 that she was ready to answer the 3 a.m. phone call. But when the call came from Benghazi, she was nowhere to be found, and forever damaged herself by insisting in public, and to the families of the four Americans who died, that an anti-Muslim video was to blame. 

Yet we know now, thanks to the congressional hearing, that she was saying in private that it was a planned terrorist attack. 

That’s the real Hillary — the one who will say whatever is best for her at the moment. In that, and in that only, we can trust.