Photo Credit: AFP / Thomas Samson
By AFP.
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton blamed the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on failures of US policy under President Barack Obama, in an interview published Sunday.
Clinton specifically faulted the US decision to stay on the sidelines of the insurgency against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad as opening the way for the most extreme rebel faction, the Islamic State.
“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 told the Atlantic.
Clinton, widely considered an undeclared presidential candidate, was an unsuccessful advocate of arming the Syrian rebels when she was secretary of state during Obama’s first term.
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Photo Credit: AP
By Maggie Haberman.
Hillary Clinton has taken her furthest, most public step away yet from President Barack Obama, rejecting the core of his self-described foreign policy doctrine and describing his decision against backing Syrian rebels early on as a “failure.”
She also stood unequivocally with Israel in its current battle with Hamas in a lengthy, detailed interview on foreign policy with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, which was conducted last week prior to the president’s authorization of airstrikes against Islamist militants in Iraq. The interview was published late Saturday.
Obama’s foreign policy doctrine as a whole has been slammed as too slow to respond, too passive instead of proactive, especially as crises have unfolded everywhere from Ukraine to the Gaza Strip. In the interview, Clinton, who served as secretary of state during Obama’s first term, argues there’s a balance that can be struck between muscularity and isolationism — bolstering the concept of American exceptionalism, which she promotes in her new book, “Hard Choices.”
A source familiar with the interview said Clinton’s team gave the White House a warning that it had taken place. Clinton aides described the interview as one intended to promote her memoir, and Goldberg as a long-planned-for target on a list of interviews around the book — and not part of an overarching political strategy related to 2016.
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