 "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle." - Hillary Clinton |
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has trashed Obama's handling of Syria and Iraq in a recent interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, pointedly saying the president's refusal to help rebels in Syria led directly to the rise of ISIS.
"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.
Furthermore, she mocked a catch-phrase President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: "Don’t do stupid shit."
"Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff'’ is not an organizing principle, she countered.
Clinton called for the United States to develop an "overarching" strategy to combat Islamic terrorism.
"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," she said.
"Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d'etre 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."
"You know, we did a good job in containing the Soviet Union but we made a lot of mistakes, we supported really nasty guys, we did some things that we are not particularly proud of, from Latin America to Southeast Asia, but we did have a kind of overarching framework about what we were trying to do that did lead to the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. That was our objective. We achieved it."
Clinton also voiced concern about the continued resurgence of anti-Semitism in the world.
"You can't ever discount anti-Semitism, especially with what's going on in Europe today. There are more demonstrations against Israel by an exponential amount than there are against Russia seizing part of Ukraine and shooting down a civilian airliner. So there's something else at work here than what you see on TV."
To read the full article, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment