XPost: ba.politics, dc.media, soc.penpals   
   XPost: alt.burningman   
   From: ben@ghazi.com   
      
   The former secretary of state, and joke of a 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.   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
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