SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch)—Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has criticized President Barack Obama’s Syria policy as a failure, according to a media report Sunday.
Earlier intervention in Syria on behalf of the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have prevented the rise to power of the Sunni terrorist group that now calls itself the Islamic State and has conquered parts of Syria and adjoining Iraq, Clinton said in an interview with the Atlantic. See Clinton’s interview.
Clinton was Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. She ran against him for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. The former U.S. senator from New York now is considered the leading candidate for the 2016 nomination and the interview part of her move to distance herself from Obama’s policies.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said in the interview.
“One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist groups that can affect Europe, can affect the United States,” Clinton said in the interview. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’être is to be against the West, against the Crusaders, against the fill-in-the-blank—and we all fit into one of these categories. How do we try to contain that? I’m thinking a lot about containment, deterrence, and defeat.”
Clinton also strongly defended Israel’s actions against Hamas in Gaza, according to the interview.
What exactly was Secretary Clinton doing for those four years in all of these African and Middle Eastern worn torn locations? Perhaps her globe trotting listening tour did not exactly set up Secretary Kerry in a rose garden situation.
ReplyDelete