Remember when Hillary thought the road to the White House in 2016 involved being more hawkish that Barack Obama?
“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.
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At one point, I mentioned the slogan President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: “Don’t do stupid shit” (an expression often rendered as “Don’t do stupid stuff” in less-than-private encounters).
This is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS. Aug. 10, 2014.
She is a Democratic interventionist. No wonder some neo-cons are gravitating to her.
President Obama is right and Hillary Clinton is wrong.
In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad … left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” WhenThe Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit.
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Syria, for Obama, represented a slope potentially as slippery as Iraq. In his first term, he came to believe that only a handful of threats in the Middle East conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention. These included the threat posed by al‑Qaeda; threats to the continued existence of Israel (“It would be a moral failing for me as president of the United States” not to defend Israel, he once told me); and, not unrelated to Israel’s security, the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. The danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges.
The Atlantic
Hillary Clinton learned nothing from her Iraq vote. She was a hawk in 2008 and still is a hawk. Had she had her way, we’d be bogged down in Syria. President Obama said no. He was right and she was wrong.
The odds on more regime change and wars of choice go up if she is elected.
Bernie Sanders opposed the Iraq War. Voted against the AUMF. There is a clear contrast here.
[Disclaimer/Loyalty Oath: As practice for the New Daily Kos: This post is designed to constructively criticize Hillary Clinton. Secretary Clinton, please stop supporting wars of choice, interventions, and regime changes. As President Obama apparently believes: The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit. Please learn from your mistakes. Listen to President Obama. Please don’t do stupid shit.]