militants in Iraq and Syria on failures of US policy under President
Barack Obama, in an interview published Sunday.
Clinton specifically faulted the US decision to stay on the sidelines
of the insurgency against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad as opening
the way for the most extreme rebel faction, the Islamic State.
"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 told the Atlantic.
Clinton, widely considered an undeclared presidential candidate, was
an unsuccessful advocate of arming the Syrian rebels when she was
secretary of state during Obama's first term.
She was interviewed before the US president's decision Thursday to
order limited air strikes to check an IS offensive into Kurdistan,
which threatened US nationals and facilities and sent thousands of
refugees fleeing into the mountains.
Obama, who oversaw the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, vowed not to
send US troops back into the country and said Iraqis needed to
confront the jihadist threat by forming an inclusive unity government.
Clinton, however, suggested in the interview that Obama lacked a
strategy for dealing with the jihadist threat.
"Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff'
is not an organizing principle," she said referring to an Obama
slogan.
She said the United States must develop an "overarching" strategy to
confront Islamist extremism, likening it to the long US struggle
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 said.
Her arguments, seen as an attempt to distance herself from Obama,
echoed those of Republican critics who accuse Obama of allowing a
power vacuum to develop by failing to bring US leadership to bear in
conflicts from Syria to Iraq to Ukraine.
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