Here’s an excerpt relevant
to that “failure” thing ~
JG: You go out of your way in Hard Choices to praise Robert
Ford, who recently quit as U.S. ambassador to Syria, as an excellent diplomat.
Ford quit in protest and has recently written strongly about what he sees as
the inadequacies of Obama administration policy. Do you agree with Ford that we
are at fault for not doing enough to build up a credible Syrian opposition when
we could have?
HRC: I have the highest regard for Robert. I’m
the one who convinced the administration to send an ambassador to Syria. You
know, this is why I called the chapter on Syria “A Wicked Problem.” I can’t sit
here today and say that if we had done what I recommended, and what Robert Ford
recommended, that we’d be in a demonstrably different place.
JG: That’s the president’s argument, that we wouldn’t be in a different place.
HRC: Well, I did believe, which is why I
advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a
core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some
better insight into what was going on on the ground. Two, we would have been
helped in standing up a credible political opposition, which would prove to be
very difficult, because there was this constant struggle between what was
largely an exile group outside of Syria trying to claim to be the political
opposition, and the people on the ground, primarily those doing the fighting
and dying, who rejected that, and we were never able to bridge that, despite a
lot of efforts that Robert and others made.
So I did
think that eventually, and I said this at the time, in a conflict like this,
the hard men with the guns are going to be the more likely actors in any
political transition than those on the outside just talking. And therefore we
needed to figure out how we could support them on the ground, better equip
them, and we didn’t have to go all the way, and I totally understand the
cautions that we had to contend with, but we’ll never know. And I don’t think
we can claim to know.
JG: You do have a suspicion, though.
HRC: Obviously. I advocated for a position.
JG: Do you think we’d be where we are with
ISIS right now if the U.S. had done more three years ago to build up a moderate
Syrian opposition?
HRC: Well, I don’t know the answer to that. I
know that 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.
They were
often armed in an indiscriminate way by other forces and we had no skin in the
game that really enabled us to prevent this indiscriminate arming.
JG: Is there a chance that President Obama
overlearned the lessons of the previous administration? In other words, if the
story of the Bush administration is one of overreach, is the story of the Obama
administration one of underreach?
RC: You know, I don’t think you can draw that
conclusion. It’s a very key question. How do you calibrate, that’s the key
issue. I think we have learned a lot during this period, but then how to apply
it going forward will still take a lot of calibration and balancing. But you
know, we helped overthrow [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi.
Also, at some point in the
transcript he asks:
JG: Is the lesson for
you, like it is for President Obama, “Don’t do stupid shit”?
HRC: That’s a good
lesson but it’s more complicated than that. Because your stupid may not be
mine, and vice versa. I don’t think it was stupid for the United States to do
everything we could to remove Qaddafi because that came from the bottom up.
That was people asking us to help. It was stupid to do what we did in Iraq and
to have no plan about what to do after we did it. That was really stupid. I
don’t think you can quickly jump to conclusions about what falls into the
stupid and non-stupid categories. That’s what I’m arguing.
If I wasn’t convinced of the writer wasn’t
credible after the first paragraph, I certainly would after these two direct
Hillary Clinton quotes from those two excerpts, I can conclude that the story
is not true
“… You
know, this is why I called the chapter on Syria “A Wicked Problem.” I can’t sit
here today and say that if we had done what I recommended, and what Robert Ford
recommended, that we’d be in a demonstrably different place.
“… That’s a good lesson but it’s more
complicated than that. Because your stupid may not be mine, and vice versa. …”
Here’s
another reference to that “failure” thing ~
He
writes, 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.
NOTE: SUPPORTERS? WHO? NAME NAMES.
He writes, Professional Clinton-watchers (and there are
battalions of them) have told me that it is only a matter of time before she
makes a more forceful attempt to highlight her differences with the (unpopular) president she ran against, and
then went on to serve. On a number of occasions during my interview with her, I
got the sense that this effort is already underway. (And for what it's worth, I
also think she may have told me that she’s running for president—see below for
her not-entirely-ambiguous nod in that direction.)
NOTE: “PROFESSIONAL
CLINTON-WATCHERS..,” WHO? NAME NAMES. “…I got the sense that
this effort is already underway …” THAT
IS NOT REPORTING, THAT IS DIVINING BASED ON A FEELING. “…I also think she
may have told me that she’s running for president …” THAT IS NOT REPORTING EITHER, THAT IS DIVINING, BASED ONE’S PERSONAL
SENSES.
He wrote, Of
course, Clinton had many kind words for the “incredibly intelligent” and
“thoughtful” Obama, and she expressed sympathy and understanding for the
devilishly complicated challenges he faces. But she also suggested that she
finds his approach to foreign policy overly cautious, and she made the case
that America needs a leader who believes that the country, despite its various
missteps, is an indispensable force for good. At one point, I mentioned the
slogan President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine:
“Don’t do stupid shit” (an expression often rendered as “Don’t do stupid stuff”
in less-than-private encounters).
NOTE: “… But she also suggested that she finds his
approach to foreign policy overly cautious …” BUT SHE ALSO SUGGESTED IS NOT REPORTING, IT’S GUESSING. WHERE’S THE
DIRECT QUOTE?
He wrote, This is
what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing
principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
She
softened the blow by noting that Obama was “trying to communicate to the
American people that he’s not going to do something crazy,” but she repeatedly
suggested that the U.S. sometimes appears to be withdrawing from the world
stage.
Here’s a
transcript excerpt relevant to: “Don’t do stupid stuff”:
JG: So why do you think the president went out
of his way to suggest recently that that this is his foreign policy in a
nutshell?
HRC: I think he was trying to communicate to
the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy. I’ve sat in too
many rooms with the president. He’s thoughtful, he’s incredibly smart, and able
to analyze a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time. I
think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two wars and
the economic front, and he has expended a lot of capital and energy trying to
pull us out of the hole we’re in.
So I
think that that’s a political message. It’s not his worldview, if that makes
sense to you.
During a
discussion about the dangers of jihadism (a topic that has her
“hepped-up," she told me moments after she greeted me at her office in New
York) and of the sort of resurgent nationalism seen in Russia today, I noted
that Americans are quite wary right now of international commitment-making. She
responded by arguing that there is a happy medium between bellicose posturing
(of the sort she associated with the George W. Bush administration) and its
opposite, a focus on withdrawal.
“You
know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling
back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were
aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” she said. “One issue is
that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.”
I
responded by saying that I thought that “defeating fascism and communism is a
pretty big deal.” In other words, that the U.S., on balance, has done a good
job of advancing the cause of freedom.
Clinton
responded to this idea with great enthusiasm: “That’s how I feel! Maybe this is
old-fashioned.” And then she seemed to signal that, yes, indeed, she’s planning
to run for president. “Okay, I feel that this might be an old-fashioned idea,
but I’m about to find out, in more ways than one.”
She said
that the resilience, and expansion, of Islamist terrorism means that the U.S.
must develop an “overarching” strategy to confront it, and she equated this
struggle to the one the U.S. waged against Soviet-led communism.
Clinton-watchers
say it's a matter of time before she highlights her differences with Obama. I
got the sense that this effort is well underway.
NOTE: “… And
then she seemed to signal …” “SEEMED” IS
NOT REPORTING, IT’S GUESSING.
He wrote,
“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.”
She went
on, “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.” (This was one of those moments, by the way,
when I was absolutely sure I wasn’t listening to President Obama, who is loath
to discuss the threat of Islamist terrorism in such a sweeping manner.)
NOTE: AND, IN THE LAST SENTENCE, THE ONE IN PARENTHESIS, WE
HAVE A PERSONAL COMMENT BY THE WRITER WITH NO NAMES PROVIDED ~ WHO IS IT THE
PRESIDENT IS “LOATH TO DISCUSS THE THREAT OF ISLAMIST TERRORISM…” WITH?
A transcript excerpt relevant to Hillary Clinton’s Foreign Policy
~
JG: There doesn’t seem to be a domestic constituency
for the type of engagement you might symbolize.
HRC: Well, that’s because most Americans think of engagement and
go immediately to military engagement. That’s why I use the phrase “smart
power.” I did it deliberately because I thought we had to have another way of
talking about American engagement, other than unilateralism and the so-called
boots on the ground.
You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering
down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when
you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward. One issue is
that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.
NOTE:
HE NEVER ASKS HER TO DEFINE “SMART
POWER.” IF HE HAD MIGHT HAVE FOUND OUT THERE IS VERY LITTLE DAY LIGHT BETWEEN HILLARY AND
PRESIDENT OBAMA ON FOREIGN POLICY ~ NOT DURING THE ELECTION, NOT DURING HER TIME AS HIS SOS AND NOT NOW.
Mmmm.
So. The point of the story was, what? BS...
#StayingFocused:
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