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It's not often that I agree with Hillary Clinton, but she's absolutely right. President Obama messed this one up. He isn't the first president to make a huge foreign policy mistake and he certainly won't be the last.
With that being said, I think it's fairly obvious that Hillary's recent criticisms of Obama's policies is for political reasons. She's trying to create a distance between herself and the President. It'll be interesting to see if that strategy works.
Seems she is still pissed and bitter about 2008 and I can't see distancing herself from Obama helping her at all. I can't see Hillary winning the Presidency in 2016 - she's showing herself to be too calculating and self serving.
Helping rebels in Syria or not is a crapshoot - we could have still wound up helping the wrong rebels and putting more US arms in ISIS hands. When Republicans get off their everything-Obama-does-is-wrong knee-jerk reactions they have no consistency as to whether we should have intervened in Syria earlier. Iraq, Egypt, and Libya show that things don't go as planned... and deposing Assad would not have gone as planned.
Imagine what the world would be like if Franklin Roosevelt declared in June, 1942 that America would be leaving Europe no later than December 31, 1943.
That was because the US entered those conflicts with a specific view of victory of the war that the nation already fully accepted and could be, in fact, materially accomplished.
Whenever any decision boils all the way up to POTUS, whether D or R, it's not quite as simple as oh let's do option 2 as it's going to be perfect.
Book after Book, article after article ..... pretty much all say the same thing.
Obama only listens to a very small bubble of people and they all think the same way.
Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder, Denis McDonough, Michelle Obama, John Brennan - a few more. They don't "bounce ideas", they don't pay any attention to what the experts, Cabinet Secretaries or even the Military advisers say ..... this small group think with one brain, they think alike and are SURE they are correct.
In author David Remnick’s Obama biography, “The Bridge,” he quotes White House adviser and longtime friend Valerie Jarrett: “I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. ... He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. ... So, what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. ... He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”
"Obama would sort of say, 'Look, I'm smart. I know what I'm doing. You'll just have to trust me,'” said Democratic strategist and commentator James Carville. “It was kind of beneath him to explain the reasons behind his actions to people — how TARP really worked, how the stimulus was helping. ... You had a lot of signs — New Jersey, Virginia, Scott Brown — but they thought what they were doing was going to turn out all right.”
A 2008 New Yorker article quoted Patrick Gaspard, now the White House political director, describing what Obama told him during the job interview: “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
Those that try to cross them or dare to speak out are bounced out in a hurry. It's been referred to as a Faculty Lounge type of Policy making. They do what "seems" reasonable to them and then are "shocked" when it doesn't work. They claim to learn about current events by reading the media and watching television ..... and I don't doubt that. What we do know is that Obama has always been like this and that he didn't "change" after his 2010 "shellacking" - he is not capable of "change". There doesn't appear to be any "what if I'm wrong?" to any of them. Obama's followers are in reality his enablers. It's not healthy.
And with this interview Hillary just lost the 2016 election. Republicans would never vote for her anyways and now she's alienating Democrats.
Comments at left wing TPM: Discussion: Clinton Knocks Obama's 'Don't Do Stupid Stuff' Foreign Policy Approach - The Hive
"...Hillary's pandering to Israel, her disavowing of her own lack of successes in the Middle East (reminding me very much of her disavowing of her vote for the Iraq War) and her biting of the administration hand that fed her so generously, has left me quite worried. This one interview has convinced me for the first time that Clinton may not be the best candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016."
"Yes, the lady who helped get us entangled in Iraq, wants to entangle us in Syria.
Arming one side in the Middle East only legitimizes the other side. And, inevitably, the funding/weapons we would have sent into Syria, would have been seized by ISIL (as they're doing with our weapons left in Iraq)."
I don't know about a failure to act in Syria. I could never conclude that there were identifiable good guys and bad guys involved in the fighting in Syria.
But it was beyond negligent and stupid to not use air power against ISIS as soon as it began invading Iraq, and all during the time they were convoying and attacking around northern Iraq.
I'll cut that off since what you said doesn't matter. My point, which was correct, is that no decision that boils up to the president is an easy one nor does it have an easy answer. Your response is called a Red Herring. Should you want to whine about books that people have written then go start a thread about that. Your thread is not about that. I pretty much shot down every thought you had in your original post and yet your response is a red herring about a general statement that I made in my post. Seriously?
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