Subject: Correct The Record Sunday August 10, 2014 Roundup
From: Burns Strider <[email-masked]>
To: CTRFriendsFamily <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 14:39:38 -0400
List-Id: <CTRFriendsFamily.americanbridge.org>

**

*Correct The Record Sunday August 10, 2014 Roundup:*

*Headlines:*

*The Atlantic: “Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the
Rise of ISIS”
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/?single_page=true>*

"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.”"

*Politico: “Hillary Clinton takes on Obama”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/hillary-clinton-takes-president-barack-obama-109887.html>*

“Hillary Clinton has taken her furthest and most public step away from
President Barack Obama, describing his decision against helping build a
‘credible’ force that could battle the Assad regime in Syria early on as a
‘failure.’”

*Politico: “Barack Obama rebukes Syrian ‘fantasy’”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/barack-obama-rebukes-syrian-fantasy-109890.html>*

“The president’s interview with op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman, published
online Friday, offered an inherent rebuke of Hillary Clinton, whose memoir
revealed that the former secretary of state wanted to arm moderate Syrian
rebels in the nascent stages of the war. In a newly published interview
with The Atlantic given before Obama’s interview, Hillary Clinton said the
failure to build a strong rebel force against the Assad regime ‘left a big
vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.’”

*Politico: “Clinton hint at future fuels 2016 talk”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/hillary-clinton-hint-future-fuels-2016-talk-109891.html>*

“Hillary Clinton says she expects her view of America’s role in the world
to be tested in the future ‘in more ways than one,’ a comment fueling
speculation about her presidential ambitions.”

*Washington Examiner: “Hillary Clinton distances herself from President
Obama's foreign policy”
<http://washingtonexaminer.com/hillary-clinton-distances-herself-from-president-obamas-foreign-policy/article/2551869>*

“Hillary Clinton is stepping away from President Obama on foreign policy."

*The Hill: “Hillary Clinton: PR battle 'tilted against' Israel”
<http://thehill.com/policy/international/214791-hillary-clinton-pr-battle-tilted-against-israel>*

“Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ratcheted up her language
supporting America's strongest Middle East ally, saying the world opinion
is ‘historically tilted against Israel.’”

*Articles:*

*The Atlantic: “Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to the
Rise of ISIS”
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/08/hillary-clinton-failure-to-help-syrian-rebels-led-to-the-rise-of-isis/375832/?single_page=true>*

By Jeffrey Goldberg

August 10, 2014, 12:01 a.m. EDT

[Subtitle:] 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."

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

“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.)

Much of my conversation with Clinton focused on the Gaza war. She offered a
vociferous defense of Israel, and of its prime minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, as well. This is noteworthy because, as secretary of state, she
spent a lot of time yelling at Netanyahu on the administration's behalf
over Israel’s West Bank settlement policy. Now, she is leaving no daylight
at all between the Israelis and herself.

“I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets,” she told
me. “Israel has a right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to
embed rockets and command-and-control facilities and tunnel entrances in
civilian areas, this makes a response by Israel difficult.”

I asked her if she believed that Israel had done enough to prevent the
deaths of children and other innocent people.

 “[J]ust as we try to do in the United States and be as careful as possible
in going after targets to avoid civilians,” mistakes are made, she said.
“We’ve made them. I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are—and
I think that democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a
conflict position—that hasn’t made errors, but ultimately the
responsibility rests with Hamas.”

She went on to say that “it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of
war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed,
but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the
rockets. And I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to
because of the coverage, and the women and the children and all the rest of
that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.”

She continued, “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this
conflict. … So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the
decisions it made.”

When I asked her about the intense international focus on Gaza, she was
quick to identify anti-Semitism as an important motivating factor in
criticism of Israel. “It is striking … that you have more than 170,000
people dead in Syria. … You have Russia massing battalions—Russia, that
actually annexed and is occupying part of a UN member-state—and I fear that
it will do even more to prevent the incremental success of the Ukrainian
government to take back its own territory, other than Crimea. More than
1,000 people have been killed in Ukraine on both sides, not counting the
[Malaysia Airlines] plane, and yet we do see this enormous international
reaction against Israel, and Israel’s right to defend itself, and the way
Israel has to defend itself. This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.”

She went on, “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.” Clinton also blamed Hamas for
“stage-managing” the conflict. “What you see is largely what Hamas invites
and permits Western journalists to report on from Gaza. It’s the old PR
problem that Israel has. Yes, there are substantive, deep levels of
antagonism or anti-Semitism towards Israel, because it’s a powerful state,
a really effective military. And Hamas paints itself as the defender of the
rights of the Palestinians to have their own state. So the PR battle is one
that is historically tilted against Israel.”

Clinton also seemed to take an indirect shot at administration critics of
Netanyahu, who has argued that the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in the
Middle East means that Israel cannot, in the foreseeable future, withdraw
its forces from much of the West Bank. “If I were the prime minister of
Israel, you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security,
because even if I’m dealing with [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud]
Abbas, who is 79 years old, and other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a
better lifestyle and making money on all kinds of things, that does not
protect Israel from the influx of Hamas or cross-border attacks from
anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq, it is all one big threat. So Netanyahu
could not do this in good conscience.”

She also struck a notably hard line on Iran’s nuclear demands. “I’ve always
been in the camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment,”
Clinton said. “Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right
to enrich. This is absolutely unfounded. There is no such right. I am well
aware that I am not at the negotiating table anymore, but I think it’s
important to send a signal to everybody who is there that there cannot be a
deal unless there is a clear set of restrictions on Iran. The preference
would be no enrichment. The potential fallback position would be such
little enrichment that they could not break out.” When I asked her if the
demands of Israel, and of America’s Arab allies, that Iran not be allowed
any uranium-enrichment capability whatsoever were militant or unrealistic,
she said, “I think it’s important that they stake out that position.”

What follows is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for
clarity but not for length, as you will see. Two other things to look for:
First, the masterful way in which Clinton says she has drawn no conclusions
about events in Syria and elsewhere, and then draws rigorously reasoned
conclusions. Second, her fascinating and complicated analysis of the Muslim
Brotherhood's ill-fated dalliance with democracy.

***

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: It seems that you’ve shifted your position on Iran’s
nuclear ambitions. By [chief U.S. negotiator] Wendy Sherman’s definition of
maximalism, you’ve taken a fairly maximalist position—little or no
enrichment for Iran. Are you taking a harder line than your former
colleagues in the Obama administration are taking on this matter?

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: It’s a consistent line. I’ve always been in the
camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment. Contrary to
their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich. This is
absolutely unfounded. There is no such right. I am well aware that I am not
at the negotiating table anymore, but I think it’s important to send a
signal to everybody who is there that there cannot be a deal unless there
is a clear set of restrictions on Iran. The preference would be no
enrichment. The potential fallback position would be such little enrichment
that they could not break out. So, little or no enrichment has always been
my position.

JG: Am I wrong in saying that the Obama administration’s negotiators have a
more flexible understanding of this issue at the moment?

HRC: I don’t want to speak for them, but I would argue that Iran, through
the voice of the supreme leader, has taken a very maximalist position—he
wants 190,000 centrifuges and the right to enrich. And some in our
Congress, and some of our best friends, have taken the opposite
position—absolutely no enrichment. I think in a negotiation you need to be
very clear about what it is going to take to move the other side. I think
at the moment there is a big debate going on in Tehran about what they can
or should do in order to get relief from the sanctions. It’s my
understanding that we still have a united P5+1 position, which is intensive
inspections, very clear limits on what they can do in their facilities that
they would permitted to operate, and then how they handle this question of
enrichment, whether it’s done from the outside, or whether it can truly be
constrained to meet what I think our standard should be of little-to-no
enrichment. That’s what this negotiation is about.

JG: But there is no sign that the Iranians are willing to pull
back—freezing in place is the farthest they seem to be willing to go. Am I
wrong?

HRC: We don’t know. I think there’s a political debate. I think you had the
position staked out by the supreme leader that they’re going to get to do
what they want to do, and that they don’t have any intention of having a
nuclear weapon but they nevertheless want 190,000 centrifuges (laughs). I
think the political, non-clerical side of the equation is basically saying,
“Look, you know, getting relief from these sanctions is economically and
politically important to us. We have our hands full in Syria and Iraq, just
to name two places, maybe increasingly in Lebanon, and who knows what’s
going to happen with us and Hamas. So what harm does it do to have a very
strict regime that we can live under until we determine that maybe we won’t
have to any longer?” That, I think, is the other side of the argument.

JG: Would you be content with an Iran that is perpetually a year away from
being able to reach nuclear-breakout capability?

HRC: I would like it to be more than year. I think it should be more than
year. No enrichment at all would make everyone breathe easier. If, however,
they want a little bit for the Tehran research reactor, or a little bit for
this scientific researcher, but they’ll never go above 5 percent enrichment—

JG: So, a few thousand centrifuges?

HRC: We know what “no” means. If we’re talking a little, we’re talking
about a discrete, constantly inspected number of centrifuges. “No” is my
preference.

JG: Would you define what “a little” means?

HRC: No.

JG: So what the Gulf states want, and what the Israelis want, which is to
say no enrichment at all, is not a militant, unrealistic position?

HRC: It’s not an unrealistic position. I think it’s important that they
stake out that position.

JG: So, Gaza. As you write in your book, you negotiated the last long-term
ceasefire in 2012. Are you surprised at all that it didn’t hold?

HRC: I’m surprised that it held as long as it did. But given the changes in
the region, the fall of [former Egyptian President Mohamed] Morsi, his
replacement by [Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi, the corner that Hamas felt itself
in, I’m not surprised that Hamas provoked another attack.

JG: The Israeli response, was it disproportionate?

HRC: Israel was attacked by rockets from Gaza. Israel has a right to defend
itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command-and-control
facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a response by
Israel difficult. Of course Israel, just like the United States, or any
other democratic country, should do everything they can possibly do to
limit civilian casualties.

JG: Do you think Israel did enough to limit civilian casualties?

HRC: It’s unclear. I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the
rockets. And there is the surprising number and complexity of the tunnels,
and Hamas has consistently, not just in this conflict, but in the past,
been less than protective of their civilians.

JG: Before we continue talking endlessly about Gaza, can I ask you if you
think we spend too much time on Gaza and on Israel-Palestine generally? I
ask because over the past year or so your successor spent a tremendous
amount of time on the Israel-Palestinian file and in the same period of
time an al Qaeda-inspired organization took over half of Syria and Iraq.

HRC: Right, right.

JG: I understand that secretaries of state can do more than one thing at a
time. But what is the cause of this preoccupation?

HRC: I’ve thought a lot about this, because you do have a number of
conflicts going on right now. As the U.S., as a U.S. official, you have to
pay attention to anything that threatens Israel directly, or anything in
the larger Middle East that arises out of the Palestinian-Israeli
situation. That’s just a given.

It is striking, however, that you have more than 170,000 people dead in
Syria. You have the vacuum that has been created by the relentless assault
by Assad on his own population, an assault that has bred these extremist
groups, the most well-known of which, ISIS—or ISIL—is now literally
expanding its territory inside Syria and inside Iraq. You have Russia
massing battalions—Russia, that actually annexed and is occupying part of a
UN member state—and I fear that it will do even more to prevent the
incremental success of the Ukrainian government to take back its own
territory, other than Crimea. More than 1,000 people have been killed in
Ukraine on both sides, not counting the [Malaysia Airlines] plane, and yet
we do see this enormous international reaction against Israel, and Israel’s
right to defend itself, and the way Israel has to defend itself. This
reaction is uncalled for and unfair.

JG: What do you think causes this reaction?

HRC: There are a number of factors going into it. 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.

And what you see on TV is so effectively stage-managed by Hamas, and always
has been. What you see is largely what Hamas invites and permits Western
journalists to report on from Gaza. It’s the old PR problem that Israel
has. Yes, there are substantive, deep levels of antagonism or anti-Semitism
towards Israel, because it’s a powerful state, a really effective military.
And Hamas paints itself as the defender of the rights of the Palestinians
to have their own state. So the PR battle is one that is historically
tilted against Israel.

JG: Nevertheless there are hundreds of children—

HRC: Absolutely, and it’s dreadful.

JG: Who do you hold responsible for those deaths? How do you parcel out
blame?

HRC: I’m not sure it’s possible to parcel out blame because it’s impossible
to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t
the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school
next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes
that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women
and the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort
through to get to the truth.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict and wanted
to do so in order to leverage its position, having been shut out by the
Egyptians post-Morsi, having been shunned by the Gulf, having been pulled
into a technocratic government with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority
that might have caused better governance and a greater willingness on the
part of the people of Gaza to move away from tolerating Hamas in their
midst. So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the
decisions it made.

That doesn’t mean that, just as we try to do in the United States and be as
careful as possible in going after targets to avoid civilians, that there
aren’t mistakes that are made. We’ve made them. I don’t know a nation, no
matter what its values are—and I think that democratic nations have
demonstrably better values in a conflict position—that hasn’t made errors,
but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas.

JG: Several years ago, when you were in the Senate, we had a conversation
about what would move Israeli leaders to make compromises for peace. You’ve
had a lot of arguments with Netanyahu. What is your thinking on Netanyahu
now?

HRC: Let’s step back. First of all, [former Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak
Rabin was prepared to do so much and he was murdered for that belief. And
then [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Barak offered everything you
could imagine being given under any realistic scenario to the Palestinians
for their state, and [former Palestinian leader Yasir] Arafat walked away.
I don’t care about the revisionist history. I know that Arafat walked away,
okay? Everybody says, “American needs to say something.” Well, we said it,
it was the Clinton parameters, we put it out there, and Bill Clinton is
adored in Israel, as you know. He got Netanyahu to give up territory, which
Netanyahu believes lost him the prime ministership [in his first term], but
he moved in that direction, as hard as it was.

Bush pretty much ignored what was going on and they made a terrible error
in the Palestinian elections [in which Hamas came to power in Gaza], but he
did come with the Roadmap [to Peace] and the Roadmap was credible and it
talked about what needed to be done, and this is one area where I give the
Palestinians credit. Under [former Palestinian Prime Minister] Salam
Fayyad, they made a lot of progress.

I had the last face-to-face negotiations between Abbas and Netanyahu.
[Secretary of State John] Kerry never got there. I had them in the room
three times with [former Middle East negotiator] George Mitchell and me,
and that was it. And I saw Netanyahu move from being against the two-state
solution to announcing his support for it, to considering all kinds of
Barak-like options, way far from what he is, and what he is comfortable
with.

Now I put Jerusalem in a different category. That is the hardest issue,
Again, based on my experience—and you know, I got Netanyahu to agree to the
unprecedented  settlement freeze, it did not cover East Jerusalem, but it
did cover the West Bank and it was actually legitimate and it did stop new
housing starts for 10 months. It took me nine months to get Abbas into the
negotiations even after we delivered on the settlement freeze, he had a
million reasons, some of them legitimate, some of them the same old, same
old.

So what I tell people is, yeah, if I were the prime minister of Israel,
you’re damn right I would expect to have control over security [on the West
Bank], because even if I’m dealing with Abbas, who is 79 years old, and
other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making
money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx
of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else. With Syria and Iraq,
it is all one big threat. So Netanyahu could not do this in good
conscience. If this were Rabin or Barak in his place—and I’ve talked to
Ehud about this—they would have to demand a level of security that would be
provided by the [Israel Defense Forces] for a period of time. And in my
meetings with them I got Abbas to about six, seven, eight years on
continued IDF presence. Now he’s fallen back to three, but he was with me
at six, seven, eight. I got Netanyahu to go from forever to 2025. That’s a
negotiation, okay? So I know. Dealing with Bibi is not easy, so people get
frustrated and they lose sight of what we’re trying to achieve here.

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?

HRC: 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.

JG: But we didn’t stick around for the aftermath.

HRC: Well, we did stick around. We stuck around with offers of money and
technical assistance, on everything from getting rid of some of the nasty
stuff he left behind, to border security, to training. It wasn’t just us,
it was the Europeans as well. Some of the Gulf countries had their
particular favorites. They certainly stuck around and backed their favorite
militias. It is not yet clear how the Libyans themselves will overcome the
lack of security, which they inherited from Qaddafi. Remember, they’ve had
two good elections. They’ve elected moderates and secularists and a limited
number of Islamists, so you talk about democracy in action—the Libyans have
done it twice—but they can’t control the ground. But how can you help when
you have so many different players who looted the stuffed warehouses of
every kind of weapon from the Qaddafi regime, some of which they’re using
in Libya, some of which they’re passing out around the region?

So you can go back and argue either, we should we have helped the people of
Libya try to overthrow a dictator who, remember, killed Americans and did a
lot of other bad stuff, or we should have been on the sidelines. In this
case we helped, but that didn’t make the road any easier in Syria, where we
said, “It’s messy, it’s complicated, we’re not sure what the outcome will
be.” So what I’m hoping for is that we sort out what we have learned,
because we’ve tried a bunch of different approaches. Egypt is a perfect
example. The revolution in Tahrir Square was not a Muslim Brotherhood
revolution. It was not led by Islamists. They came very late to the party.
Mubarak falls and I’m in Cairo a short time after, meeting the leaders of
this movement, and I’m saying, “Okay, who’s going to run for office? Who’s
going to form a political party?” and they’re saying, “We don’t do that,
that’s not who we are.”

And I said that there are only two organized groups in this country, the
military and the Muslim Brotherhood, and what we have here is an old lesson
that you can’t beat somebody with nobody. There was a real opportunity here
to, if a group had arisen out of the revolution, to create a democratic
Egyptian alternative. Didn’t  happen. What do we have to think about? In
order to do that better, I see a lot of questions that we have to be
answering. I don’t think we can draw judgments yet. I think we can draw a
judgment about the Bush administration in terms of overreach, but I don’t
know that we can reach a conclusion about underreach.

JG: There is this moment in your book, in which Morsi tells you not to
worry about jihadists in the Sinai—he says in essence that now that a
Muslim Brotherhood government is in charge, jihadists won’t feel the need
to continue their campaign. You write that this was either shockingly
sinister or shockingly naïve. Which one do you think it was?

HRC: I think Morsi was naïve. I’m just talking about Morsi, not necessarily
anyone else in the Muslim Brotherhood. I think he genuinely believed that
with the legitimacy of an elected Islamist government, that the jihadists
would see that there was a different route to power and influence and would
be part of the political process. He had every hope, in fact, that the
credible election of a Muslim Brotherhood government would mean the end of
jihadist activities within Egypt, and also exemplify that there’s a
different way to power.

The debate is between the bin Ladens of the world and the Muslim
Brotherhood. The bin Ladens believe you can’t overthrow the infidels or the
impure through politics. It has to be through violent resistance. So when I
made the case to Morsi that we were picking up a lot of intelligence about
jihadist groups creating safe havens inside Sinai, and that this would be a
threat not only to Israel but to Egypt, he just dismissed this out of hand,
and then shortly thereafter a large group of Egyptian soldiers were
murdered.

JG: In an interview in 2011, I asked you if we should fear the Muslim
Brotherhood—this is well before they came into power—and you said, ‘The
jury is out.” Is the jury still out for you today?

HRC: I think the jury would come back with a lesser included offense, and
that is a failure to govern in a democratic, inclusive manner while holding
power in Cairo. The Muslim Brotherhood had the most extraordinary
opportunity to demonstrate the potential for an Islamist movement to take
responsibility for governance, and they were ill-prepared and unable to
make the transition from movement to responsibility. We will see how they
respond to the crackdown they’re under in Egypt, but the Muslim Brotherhood
itself, although it had close ties with Hamas, for example, had not
evidenced, because they were kept under tight control by Mubarak, the
willingness to engage in violent conflict to achieve their goals. So the
jury is in on their failure to govern in a way that would win the
confidence of the entire Egyptian electorate. The jury is out as to whether
they morph into a violent jihadist resistance group.

JG: There’s a critique you hear of the Obama administration in the Gulf, in
Jordan, in Israel, that it is a sign of naiveté to believe that there are
Islamists you can work with, and that Hamas might even be a group that you
could work with. Is there a role for political Islam in these countries?
Can we ever find a way to work with them?

HRC: I think it’s too soon to tell. I would not put Hamas in the category
of people we could work with. I don’t think that is realistic because its
whole reason for being is resistance against Israel, destruction of Israel,
and it is married to very nasty tactics and ideologies, including virulent
anti-Semitism. I do not think they should be in any way treated as a
legitimate interlocutor, especially because if you do that, it redounds to
the disadvantage of the Palestinian Authority, which has a lot of problems,
but historically has changed its charter, moved away from the kind of
guerrilla resistance movement of previous decades.

I think you have to ask yourself, could different leaders have made a
difference in the Muslim Brotherhood’s governance of Egypt? We won’t know
and we can’t know the answer to that question. We know that Morsi was
ill-equipped to be president of Egypt. He had no political experience. He
was an engineer, he was wedded to the ideology of top-down control.

JG: But you’re open to the idea that there are sophisticated Islamists out
there?

HRC: I think you’ve seen a level of sophistication in Tunisia. It’s a very
different environment than Egypt, much smaller, but you’ve seen the Ennahda
Party evolve from being quite demanding that their position be accepted as
the national position but then being willing to step back in the face of
very strong political opposition from secularists, from moderate Muslims,
etc. So Tunisia might not be the tail that wags the dog, but it’s an
interesting tail. If you look at Morocco, where the king had a major role
in organizing the electoral change, you have a head of state who is a
monarch who is descended from Muhammad, you have a government that is
largely but not completely representative of the Muslim party of Morocco.
So I think that there are not a lot of analogies, but when you look around
the world, there’s a Hindu nationalist party now, back in power in India.
The big question for Prime Minister Modi is how inclusive he will be as
leader because of questions raised concerning his governance of Gujurat
[the state he governed, which was the scene of anti-Muslim riots in 2002].
There were certainly Christian parties in Europe, pre- and post-World War
II. They had very strong values that they wanted to see their society
follow, but they were steeped in democracy, so they were good political
actors.

JG: So, it’s not an impossibility.

HRC: It’s not an impossibility. So far, it doesn’t seem likely. We have to
say that. Because for whatever reason, whatever combination of reasons,
there hasn’t been the soil necessary to nurture the political side of the
experience, for people whose primary self-definition is as Islamists.

JG: Are we so egocentric, so Washington-centric, that we think that our
decisions are dispositive? As secretary, did you learn more about the
possibilities of American power or the limitations of American power?

HRC: Both, but it’s not just about American power. It’s American values
that also happen to be universal values. If you have no political—small
“p”—experience, it is really hard to go from a dictatorship to anything
resembling what you and I would call democracy. That’s the lesson of Egypt.
We didn’t invade Egypt. They did it themselves, and once they did it they
looked around and didn’t know what they were supposed to do next.

I think we’ve learned about the limits of our power to spread freedom and
democracy. That’s one of the big lessons out of Iraq. But we’ve also
learned about the importance of our power, our influence, and our values
appropriately deployed and explained. If you’re looking at what we could
have done that would have been more effective, would have been more
accepted by the Egyptians on the political front, what could we have done
that would have been more effective in Libya, where they did their
elections really well under incredibly difficult circumstances but they
looked around and they had no levers to pull because they had these
militias out there. My passion is, let’s do some after-action reviews,
let’s learn these lessons, let’s figure out how we’re going to have
different and better responses going forward.

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.

JG: Do you think the next administration, whoever it is, can find some
harmony between muscular intervention—“We must do something”—vs. let’s just
not do something stupid, let’s stay away from problems like Syria because
it’s a wicked problem and not something we want to tackle?

HRC: I think part of the challenge is that our government too often has a
tendency to swing between these extremes. The pendulum swings back and then
the pendulum swings the other way. What I’m arguing for is to take a hard
look at what tools we have. Are they sufficient for the complex situations
we’re going to face, or not? And what can we do to have better tools? I do
think that is an important debate.

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. Jihadist groups are governing
territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand.
Their raison d'être 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.

Now the big mistake was thinking that, okay, the end of history has come
upon us, after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was never true, history
never stops and nationalisms were going to assert themselves, and then
other variations on ideologies were going to claim  their space. Obviously,
jihadi Islam is the prime example, but not the only example—the effort by
Putin to restore his vision of Russian greatness is another. In the world
in which we are living right now, vacuums get filled by some pretty
unsavory players.

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.

JG: I think that defeating fascism and communism is a pretty big deal.

HRC: That’s how I feel! Maybe this is old-fashioned. Okay, I feel that this
might be an old-fashioned idea—but I’m about to find out, in more ways than
one.

Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is
not an organizing principle. It may be a necessary brake on the actions you
might take in order to promote a vision.

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.

JG: There is an idea in some quarters that the administration shows signs
of believing that we, the U.S., aren’t so great, so we shouldn’t be telling
people what to do.

HRC: I know that that is an opinion held by a certain group of Americans, I
get all that. It’s not where I’m at.

JG: What is your organizing principle, then?

HRC: Peace, progress, and prosperity. This worked for a very long time.
Take prosperity. That’s a huge domestic challenge for us. If we don’t
restore the American dream for Americans, then you can forget about any
kind of continuing leadership in the world. Americans deserve to feel
secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before
you go to them and say, “We’re going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes
in the South China Sea.” You’ve got to take care of your home first. That’s
another part of the political messaging that you have to engage in right
now. People are not only turned off about being engaged in the world,
they’re pretty discouraged about what’s happening here at home.

I think people want—and this is a generalization I will go ahead and
make—people want to make sure our economic situation improves and that our
political decision-making improves. Whether they articulate it this way or
not, I think people feel like we’re facing really important challenges here
at home: The economy is not growing, the middle class is not feeling like
they are secure, and we are living in a time of gridlock and dysfunction
that is just frustrating and outraging.

People assume that we’re going to have to do what we do so long as it’s not
stupid, but what people want us to focus on are problems here at home. If
you were to scratch below the surface on that—and I haven’t looked at the
research or the polling—but I think people would say, first things first.
Let’s make sure we are taking care of our people and we’re doing it in a
way that will bring rewards to those of us who work hard, play by the
rules, and yeah, we don’t want to see the world go to hell in a handbasket,
and they don’t want to see a resurgence of aggression by anybody.

JG: Do you think they understand your idea about expansionist jihadism
following us home?

HRC: I don’t know that people are thinking about it. People are thinking
about what is wrong with people in Washington that they can’t make
decisions, and they want the economy to grow again. People are feeling a
little bit that there’s a little bit happening that is making them feel
better about the economy, but it’s not nearly enough where it should be.

JG: Have you been able to embed your women’s agenda at the core of what the
federal government does?

HRC: Yes, we did. We had the first-ever ambassador for global women’s
issues. That’s permanent now, and that’s a big deal because that is the
beachhead.

Secretary Kerry to his credit has issued directions to embassies and
diplomats about this continuing to be a priority for our government. There
is also a much greater basis in research now that proves you cannot have
peace and security without the participation of women. You can’t grow your
GDP without opening the doors to full participation of women and girls in
the formal economy.

JG: There’s a link between misogyny and stagnation in the Middle East,
which in many ways is the world’s most dysfunctional region.

HRC: It’s now very provable, when you look at the data from the IMF and the
World Bank and what opening the formal economy would mean to a country’s
GDP. You have Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe in Japan who was elected to fix
the economy after so many years of dysfunction in Japan, and one of the
major elements in his plan is to get women into the workforce. If you do
that, if I remember correctly, the GDP for Japan would go up nine percent.
Well, it would go up 34 percent in Egypt. So it’s self-evident and provable.

*Politico: “Hillary Clinton takes on Obama”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/hillary-clinton-takes-president-barack-obama-109887.html>*

By Maggie Haberman

August 10, 2014, 11:55 a.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton has taken her furthest and most public step away from
President Barack Obama, describing his decision against helping build a
“credible” force that could battle the Assad regime in Syria early on as a
“failure.”

In an interview with The Atlantic, she also rejected the core of Obama’s
self-described foreign policy doctrine and stood firmly with Israel in the
Gaza conflict.

The interview was conducted early last week before Obama authorized
airstrikes in Iraq, and it is one of the longest Clinton has given on
policy since she stepped down as Secretary of State early in 2013. At the
end of the week, Obama, in his own one-on-one interview with New York Times
columnist Tom Friedman, reiterated his view that early arming of Syrian
rebels in that conflict was a “fantasy.” He’s expressed that view
repeatedly over recent months.

The Clinton interview — lengthy and detailed — is consistent with a view of
American exceptionalism that she has discussed throughout her book tour
this summer.

Syria, where the civil war has contributed to the current conflict in Iraq,
was on track to become a clear flash point between Clinton and Obama before
she even left the administration. But her comments make clear how much of a
divide there is between the two on the topic.

“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 in the interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg last week, amid
images of a world on fire across American television screens.

The temptation will be to characterize Clinton as calibrating against a
president whose poll numbers are sinking and as a the globe has plunged
into chaos, with a downed jet in Ukraine and the U.S. pulled back into
military action in Iraq, where Islamic State fighters have gained strength
and where conflict has threatened Kurdish allies of the U.S.. And there is
no question she is making these remarks as Obama’s agenda is being dictated
by world events, and as critics are questioning his goal of trying to
minimize U.S. intervention overseas.

His foreign policy doctrine as a whole has been slammed by his critics as
too timid, too slow to respond, too passive instead of proactive.

Yet the reality is that Clinton has always been more of a hawk than Obama,
and the interview is less about her triangulating away from him than
talking about her views on policy. For an almost-certain presidential
candidate who has viewed the world through a different lens than the
president and whose aides have insisted she is being blunter about her
views than the canned version of herself in the 2008 presidential campaign,
the separation from him was, as Goldberg himself notes, only a matter of
time.

A recent POLITICO battleground poll showed Clinton’s own numbers as
Secretary of State have taken a hit, coming after months of Republican
focus on Benghazi but also as international events have dominated the news.

On Obama’s self-described foreign policy doctrine — “Don’t do stupid shit,”
or “Don’t do stupid stuff,” if, as Goldberg noted, uttered in public —
Clinton was blunt: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do
stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle. … 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.”

She added, “I think that that’s a political message. It’s not his
worldview, if that makes sense to you.”

On the question of the raging conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza
Strip, she said, ” If I were the prime minister of Israel, you’re damn
right I would expect to have control over security [on the West Bank],
because even if I’m dealing with [Mahmoud] Abbas, who is 79 years old, and
other members of Fatah, who are enjoying a better lifestyle and making
money on all kinds of things, that does not protect Israel from the influx
of Hamas or cross-border attacks from anywhere else.”

A source familiar with the interview said Clinton’s team gave the White
House a warning that it had taken place. Clinton aides would not explain
the timing, other than describing the interview as one intended to promote
her book, “Hard Choices.” It may not have been a specific effort to escape
from the creeping shadow of global chaos that has stretched over the White
House, but it will be viewed that way.

Still, the comments were with a columnist who is widely viewed as the
pre-eminent voice of the moderate-right foreign policy establishment.

And Clinton did not denounce the president - she made clear she “advocated”
for arming the Syrian rebels, but acknowledged there was no way to know
with absolute certainty whether it would have made a difference.

“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,” she said.

“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. … 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.”

The topic of Syria has been fraught between the Clintons and Obama for much
of the last 18 months. At a closed-press event for Sen. John McCain’s
institute last year, as POLITICO first reported, Bill Clinton, in a
question-and-answer session with the senator, said that Obama should act
more forcefully to help the Syrian rebels and that any president risked
looking like a “total fool” if they over learned from public opinion polls.

With Goldberg, Hillary Clinton pushed back when he asked whether Obama
could be accused of “underreaching” in his foreign policy approach.

“You know, I don’t think you can draw that conclusion,” she said. “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.”

Still, over the last 18 months, Clinton has crept around the edges of
separation from the unpopular president in whose Cabinet she served, but
the interview marks the most declarative daylight between them. Clinton
discussed the suggested plan to arm Syrian rebels, an idea she and then-CIA
head Gen. David Petraeus both pushed, as one of the fights she’d lost
internally.

But now she is using the word “failure,” a pointed description that,
according to several people familiar with her thinking, dovetails with her
frustration with the administration in recent months.

A number of Democrats have privately insisted for months that while they
expected Clinton to move away from Obama on the margins of foreign policy,
it would be risky to separate too broadly. That risk? Affronting Democrats
who did not support her in the 2008 presidential primary against Obama, and
whose backing she’ll need.

Clinton pointed to growing anti-Semitism in Europe as she defended Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and said, “I think Israel did what it
had to do to respond to the rockets. … Israel has a right to defend itself.
The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command-and-control
facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a response by
Israel difficult.”

Her successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, was caught on a hot mic on
“Fox News Sunday” appearing to criticize Netanyahu’s description of the
Gaza operation as “pinpoint,” given the number of civilian casualties.

“I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are — and I think that
democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a conflict position —
that hasn’t made errors, but ultimately the responsibility rests with
Hamas,” said Clinton.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict. … So the
ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.”

Yet, Clinton has clearly decided that she disagrees with Obama on specific
issues, and that the greater danger is in silence.

Poll after poll has shown that the American public has little stomach for
conflict abroad, or for engaging U.S. troops in drawn-out battles.

When Goldberg noted that she “symbolizes” a type of foreign policy
engagement that has dwindled in popularity in the U.S., Clinton said,
“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.”

She added, “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.”

Goldberg said he considers defeating communism and fascism to be “a big
deal,” to which Clinton exclaimed, “That’s how I feel! Maybe this is
old-fashioned. OK, I feel that this might be an old-fashioned idea — but
I’m about to find out, in more ways than one.”

Goldberg interpreted that declaration from Clinton as essentially a
statement of candidacy. Clinton has made similar asides in other
interviews, but reading the tea leaves about whether she is going to run
sort of misses the point — everything in her actions suggests she already
is.

*Politico: “Barack Obama rebukes Syrian ‘fantasy’”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/barack-obama-rebukes-syrian-fantasy-109890.html>*

By Nick Gass

August 10, 2014, 12:48 p.m. EDT

In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, President Barack Obama
defended his administration’s foreign-policy approach in the Middle East.
In Syria, Obama said the idea that arming rebels would have made a
difference has “always been a fantasy.”

The president’s interview with op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman, published
online Friday, offered an inherent rebuke of Hillary Clinton, whose memoir
revealed that the former secretary of state wanted to arm moderate Syrian
rebels in the nascent stages of the war. In a newly published interview
with The Atlantic given before Obama’s interview, Hillary Clinton said the
failure to build a strong rebel force against the Assad regime “left a big
vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.”

The president, though not mentioning his former secretary of state by name,
said such a plan was unlikely to work and was never going to happen.

“This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated
arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors,
farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to
battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by
Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the
cards,” the president said.

When asked to explain the U.S. military response to the humanitarian crisis
unfolding in the mountains of northern Iraq, Obama said there’s “an
obligation” to prevent genocide of the Yazidis at the hands of the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant. Obama repeated the line that he doesn’t want
the U.S. to become the Kurdish air force, adding that it’s up to Iraqis to
unify and maintain a stable government.

“We’re not going to let [ISIL] create some caliphate through Syria and
Iraq, but we can only do that if we know that we’ve got partners on the
ground who are capable of filling the void,” Obama said.

*Politico: “Clinton hint at future fuels 2016 talk”
<http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/hillary-clinton-hint-future-fuels-2016-talk-109891.html>*

By Katie Glueck

August 10, 2014, 1:05 p.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton says she expects her view of America’s role in the world to
be tested in the future “in more ways than one,” a comment fueling
speculation about her presidential ambitions.

In a wide-ranging foreign policy interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey
Goldberg the former secretary of state and possible Democratic presidential
frontrunner agreed with Goldberg when he said that America’s defeat of
“fascism and communism is a pretty big deal.”

“That’s how I feel! Maybe this is old-fashioned,” she said, adding, “Okay,
I feel that this might be an old-fashioned idea, but I’m about to find out,
in more ways than one.”

In Goldberg’s view, that was a likely nod at a 2016 run.

But Clinton — who has been on tour promoting “Hard Choices,” her new memoir
about her time at the State Department — has in other interviews made
similar comments about her future, though nothing concrete about a White
House run.

She also has indulged “hypothetical” questions about what a secretary of
state would bring to the presidency.

A spokesman for Clinton did not immediately respond Sunday to an emailed
request for comment on her statement.

*Washington Examiner: “Hillary Clinton distances herself from President
Obama's foreign policy”
<http://washingtonexaminer.com/hillary-clinton-distances-herself-from-president-obamas-foreign-policy/article/2551869>*

By Rebecca Berg

August 10, 2014, 1:12 p.m. EDT

Hillary Clinton is stepping away from President Obama on foreign policy.

The likely Democratic presidential candidate is distancing herself more
sharply than ever before from some important facets of President Obama's
foreign policy that evolved under her watch as secretary of state.

That includes calling the administration's lack of engagement in Syria a
"failure" and questioning Obama's guiding doctrine.

In an interview with the Atlantic magazine published Sunday, Clinton
diverged notably from her public record of support for decisions made by
the White House during her tenure, as she acknowledged key areas of
disagreement between her and President Obama.

Indeed, Clinton outright dismissed President Obama's guiding doctrine on
foreign policy, characterized repeatedly in media reports as, "Don't do
stupid stuff," rejecting that it could even be considered an "organizing
principle."

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is
not an organizing principle," Clinton said.

But, she qualified, "I think that that's a political message. It’s not
[Obama's] worldview."

"I think he was trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not
going to do something crazy," Clinton said, adding that she considers Obama
"incredibly smart" and "thoughtful."

Still, Clinton was willing to offer up her own organizing principle:
"Peace, progress, and prosperity."

Clinton also used strikingly harsh language — including the word "failure"
— to assess the administration's efforts to prevent the growth of ISIS, the
jihadist group with roots in Syria which is now driving conflict, and
threatening genocide, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq.

The United States has responded within the past week with airstrikes and
relief drops. But, Clinton said, the current situation might have been
prevented had the U.S. aided groups fighting the oppressive government led
by President Bashar Assad, a position Obama opposed.

"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,"
Clinton said.

Clinton's remarks hint at a political conundrum she would face should she
run for president. While her tenure as secretary of state would be central
to her claim to the presidency, Clinton will also need to tactfully create
separation between her individual role and the administration for which she
worked, which has been dogged by low approval ratings and could be a drag
on her bid.

Clinton is currently wrapping up a nationwide tour to promote her memoir,
Hard Choices, which detailed her tenure as secretary of state. She plans to
spend the last three weeks of August in the Hamptons with former President
Clinton.

*The Hill: “Hillary Clinton: PR battle 'tilted against' Israel”
<http://thehill.com/policy/international/214791-hillary-clinton-pr-battle-tilted-against-israel>*

By Jesse Byrnes

August 10, 2014, 1:34 p.m. EDT

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ratcheted up her language
supporting America's strongest Middle East ally, saying the world opinion
is "historically tilted against Israel."

Clinton said this week in a sweeping interview published in The Atlantic on
Sunday that the nearly month-long conflict in Gaza has been "effectively
stage-managed" by the terrorist group Hamas.

"It’s the old PR problem that Israel has," Clinton said. "Yes, there are
substantive, deep levels of antagonism or anti-Semitism towards Israel,
because it’s a powerful state, a really effective military. And Hamas
paints itself as the defender of the rights of the Palestinians to have
their own state."

"So the PR battle is one that is historically tilted against Israel," she
added.

Since fighting began July 8, more than 1,900 Palestinians and 67 Israelis
have been killed, many on the Palestinian side being civilians, according
to The Associated Press. Thousands have been wounded.

"There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict" for
political leverage, Clinton said, noting the difficulty placing blame for
civilian deaths in the "fog of war."

"The ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it
made," she said, later adding, "I would not put Hamas in the category of
people we could work with."

Clinton, who in her book Hard Choices touts her diplomatic work securing
the last long-term cease-fire in 2012, noted that her husband, former
President Bill Clinton, who is "adored in Israel," got Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give up territory and highlighted her own
ability to work with the Israeli leader.

"Dealing with Bibi is not easy, so people get frustrated and they lose
sight of what we’re trying to achieve here," she said.

When asked why Secretary of State John Kerry had spent so much time
focusing on the Israel-Palestinian situation while Islamic extremists
captured large portions of Iraq and Syria, Clinton was frank on the U.S.
commitment to Israel.

"As the U.S., as a U.S. official, you have to pay attention to anything
that threatens Israel directly, or anything in the larger Middle East that
arises out of the Palestinian-Israeli situation. That’s just a given," she
said.

*Calendar:*

*Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official
schedule.*

·  August 13 – Martha’s Vinyard, MA: Sec. Clinton signs books at Bunch of
Grapes (HillaryClintonMemoir.com
<http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/martha_s_vineyard_book_signing>)

·  August 16 – East Hampton, New York: Sec. Clinton signs books at
Bookhampton East Hampton (HillaryClintonMemoir.com
<http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/long_island_book_signing2>)

·  August 28 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes Nexenta’s OpenSDx
Summit (BusinessWire
<http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140702005709/en/Secretary-State-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-Deliver-Keynote#.U7QoafldV8E>
)

·  September 4 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton speaks at the National Clean
Energy Summit (Solar Novis Today
<http://www.solarnovus.com/hillary-rodham-clinto-to-deliver-keynote-at-national-clean-energy-summit-7-0_N7646.html>
)

·  October 2 – Miami Beach, FL: Sec. Clinton keynotes the CREW Network
Convention & Marketplace (CREW Network
<http://events.crewnetwork.org/2014convention/>)

·  October 13 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton keynotes the UNLV Foundation
Annual Dinner (UNLV
<http://www.unlv.edu/event/unlv-foundation-annual-dinner?delta=0>)

·  ~ October 13-16 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes
salesforce.com Dreamforce
conference (salesforce.com
<http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF14/keynotes.jsp>)

 ·  December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts
Conference for Women (MCFW <http://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/>)