Perhaps looking to distance herself from an increasingly failed Obama foreign policy prior to a run for the presidency in 2016, in a talk with The Atlantic, Hillary Clinton directly refutes Obama’s previous claims as regards the rise of ISIS.
She says this about President Obama’s: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
President Obama has long-ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups–like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today–from seizing control of the rebellion. In an interview in February, the president told me that “when you have a professional army … fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflict–the notion that we could have, in a clean way that didn’t commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.”
The former First Lady, Secretary of State and potential 2016 Democrat nominee wasn’t shy about elaborating on her criticism of Obama.
Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isn’t buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the “failure” that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.