海角大神

In a new interview with聽The Atlantic鈥檚聽Jeffrey Goldberg, former secretary of State and probable candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Hillary Clinton went further than she has to date in openly criticizing the foreign policy of the president that she served under from 2009 to 2013. Specifically, Mrs. Clinton draws a direct line from the president鈥檚 failure to act in Syria to the rise of the Islamic State and the problems it now poses for Iraq and the rest of the region, and generally criticized the president for a having a foreign policy that had no clear sense of purpose:

Mr. Goldberg鈥檚 article is worth reading, but it is long and defies excerpting. The quoted portion above, though, gives you a fairly good idea of the message that Clinton seems to be quite obviously be wanting to convey here, especially in the light of the events in Iraq over the past weeks and President Obama鈥檚 decision to join each of his three predecessors in engaging in military action in Iraq. In some sense, what she is saying here isn鈥檛 all that different from what she apparently says in her new book, and what she has said during her book tour this summer. In an interview with 海角大神e Amanpour to promote the book on CNN in June, for example, Clinton made several efforts to make clear that she and the president had disagreed about the proposals that had been floated in the administration to arm the Syrian rebels when the civil war began in that country in 2011. In that interview and elsewhere, Clinton has made sure to emphasize that she favored the idea but that the president ultimately decided against it.

It鈥檚 hard to understate the significance of Clinton鈥檚 comments in this interview. She has gone further than ever before in distancing herself from an increasingly unpopular president on an issue where his public support continues to plummet, foreign policy. Granted, as Maggie Haberman notes in聽Politico,听Clinton has always been more of a hawk and more of an advocate of a forceful foreign policy than Mr. Obama. However, she does more than just point out policy disagreements here. In this interview, Clinton is not just pointing out the fact that there had been a policy difference between her and the president regarding arming the Syrian rebels, she really seems to be attacking the entire manner in which the president had conducted his foreign policy, both now and during the time that she was secretary of State. In some ways, it is reminiscent of the attacks that her campaign launched against then Senator Obama during the 2008 campaign that culminated in the famous 鈥�3 a.m. phone call鈥� ad, which was essentially intended to make the case that, unlike Clinton, Obama was not ready to make the decisions that a president would need to make in a dangerous world. It鈥檚 almost as if she intends to build her likely 2016 campaign around the idea that she can provide the leadership that America needs in a dangerous world, leadership that has been lacking for quite a long time. Frida Ghitis makes this point in an opinion piece at CNN, and also suggests that this interview is the clearest sign yet that Clinton is running for president. It鈥檚 hard to disagree with that.

On some level, of course, there鈥檚 a certain amount of absurdity in Clinton criticizing the foreign policy of an administration that she was not only a part of, but in which she played a key role in shaping that very foreign policy. No doubt, when she runs for office she will be relying heavily on her experience at Foggy Bottom to make the argument that she is ready to be president, indeed it would be extraordinary if she didn鈥檛. If she鈥檚 going to claim her time as secretary of State as an argument in her favor, though, then it seems to me as though she is going to have a hard time criticizing the administration for policies that she played a role in developing. Even accepting the argument that she makes regarding the connections between the Obama administration鈥檚 decision to not intervene directly in the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State, the idea that it was merely the one thing she disagreed with the president about that led to the events we see unfolding today is simply absurd. There were a number of events that contributed to today鈥檚 state of affairs, many of which involve policies that Clinton favored, and if you鈥檙e going to make the argument that one failure by this administration is responsible then you have to look at all of them, including the ones that Clinton played a role in. You can鈥檛 claim the credit without accepting at least some of the blame, but that seems to be exactly what Hillary Clinton wants to do when it comes to the foreign policy of the Obama administration.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.