Hillary Clinton blames Syria policy for rise of Islamic State
By Jennifer Rubin August 13 at 2:32 PM
From the Republican opposition research firm America Rising, we get this portion of Hillary Clinton’s interview on
Univision:
You know, ISIS is a phenomenon and ISIS came out of the terrible turmoil in Syria. I personally had advocated that we do more to help the rebels against Assad because I worried that terrorists would take and occupy territory, and that has come to pass, not only with ISIS but other Al-Qaeda affiliates and terrorist networks.
She is making the exact point many conservative critics of the Obama administration have made: His policy of inactivity allowed a civil war to claim the lives of more than 200,000 and give the Islamic State a territory in which to operate. A spokesman for Jeb Bush, who delivered an indictment of the Obama-Hillary Clinton foreign policy this week, tells Right Turn, “Hillary cannot run away from the foreign policy she enacted as Secretary of State. While trying to point the finger at President Obama she is just reinforcing the argument Jeb made at the Reagan library – that by pulling back Obama/Clinton allowed a void to be created that has been filled by radical Islamic terrorists.”
Had the U.S. acted with dispatch before the jihadis moved in, both of these consequences could have been avoided. In pointing the finger directly at her former boss, not at George W. Bush, she deserves credit. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies e-mails me that given the debacle in Syria it “should come as no surprise, then, that Hillary Clinton is distancing herself. Of course, she needs to pick and choose carefully where she dissents from a sitting president from her own party. but this one strikes me as a safe bet.”
Former ambassador Eric Edelman likewise remarks, “I think Secretary Clinton is pursuing ‘product differentiation’ since she is trying to subtly distinguish herself from the Administration she served for four years by pointing to her private but known advocacy for arming Syrian opposition forces.” That said, this does not get her off the hook, Edelman points out: “Her answer, however, inadvertently highlights the a-strategic nature of her approach to the issue since it ignores her advocacy of toppling Gadhafi followed by a failure to devote sufficient resources to stabilizing Libya, her complicity in the failure to win a post-SOFA residual presence in Iraq for US forces that led directly to a catastrophic loss of US influence in Baghdad and indirectly to the collapse of the Iraqi security forces in the face of ISIL’s rise and expansion, and a more generalized failure to contest Iran’s struggle for mastery in the broader Middle East that has made a major contribution to the radicalization of Sunni populations from Anbar to Aleppo to Yemen.”
Moreover, it was Clinton who
referred to Bashar al-Assad as “a reformer” and actually seemed to believe Russia would be of use in resolving the civil war. Moreover, when she was out of office and free to speak up, she did not criticize the president for erasing the red line, forgoing military strikes and thereby allowing the crisis to fester and emboldening both Assad and the jihadis. To the contrary, she praised his about-face and deal with Russia to take Assad’s chemical weapons in
September 2013. Relying on that deal was another blunder, incidentally, since Syria did not turn over all its chemical weapons and continued to murder civilians.
In sum, Clinton is right that Obama’s Syria policy was a disaster and greatly contributed to the chaos in the Middle East. But that doesn’t excuse her own actions in office and out. It does, however, remind us that in freeing up billions for Syria’s closest ally, Iran, and in lifting the missile and conventional weapons embargoes, the Iran deal would once again make things much, much worse in Syria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/08/13/hillary-clinton-blames-syria-policy-for-rise-of-islamic-state/