Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed the rise of Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria on failures of US policy under US President Barack Obama, in an interview published on Sunday.
Clinton specifically faulted the US decision to stay on the sidelines of the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as opening the way for the most extreme rebel faction, the Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against al-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 magazine.
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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 on Thursday last week 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.
However, Clinton 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 US 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.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis also addressed the Iraq crisis during his weekly address in Rome on Sunday, saying that the violence and destruction there offends God and humanity as he held a silent prayer for victims of the conflict.
“We are left incredulous and dismayed by the news coming from Iraq,” the Argentine-born pontiff said. “Thousands of people, among them many Christians, banished brutally from their houses, children dying of hunger and thirst as they flee, women kidnapped, people massacred, violence of all kinds, destruction everywhere... All of this deeply offends God and deeply offends humanity.”
A hush fell over the crowd in Saint Peter’s Square after Francis, who has been tweeting calls to pray for the people of Iraq over the past two days, interrupted his prepared speech to ask for a moment of silence.
Francis thanked volunteers in Iraq and said his personal envoy Cardinal Fernando Filoni was to leave Rome for Iraq yesterday, “to assure those dear people that I am near them.”
The Vatican said in a statement later on Sunday that the pope met Filoni to discuss the mission, which is intended to show solidarity with Christians in Iraq in particular, and gave the envoy a sum of money to provide urgent help to the people worst affected.
In his address, the pope also said a failed ceasefire in Gaza could only worsen conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and prayed for victims of the Ebola virus and those working to stop it.
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