Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the Rise of ISIS

[Purveyor]

The former secretary of state, and probable candidate for president, outlines her foreign-policy doctrine. She says this about President Obama's: "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle."

AUG 10, 2014

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.”

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.

“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.

As she writes in her memoir of her State Department years, Hard Choices, she was an inside-the-administration advocate of doing more to help the Syrian rebellion. Now, her supporters argue, her position has been vindicated by recent events.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/

[MisterP]

1. eh, Juan Cole also promised ISIS was faltering and the war would be over soon

wonks and DoS agents aren't that good at looking past 6 months, I'm afraid

[leveymg]

2. ISIS was the result of the effort to move arms and fighters from Libya to Syria

Hillary and Petraeus' campaign to "help" the Syrian opposition by arming it in conjunction with Qatar worked all too well. We created it and the Saudis funded its growth and spread into Iraq.

[JayhawkSD]

3. Hillary the echo chanber.

Hillary is aware that her air of priveledge and establishment cost her in 2008. So she began trying to come up with new sound bites this year and is foundering, because all she can do is look around at what is gaining traction and fold it into her rhetoric.

First she started trying to sound like Elizabeth Warren. It wasn't very convincing, but she kept working on it. Then she saw Bernie Sanders gaining ground and so she is picking up some of his themes and folding that into her pitch. Now with this "Obama is responsible for the rise of ISIS" pitch, she is echoing the Republicans.

Never anything original. Just her own slant on the rantings of others.