Hillary Lets Her Inner Neocon Show

Hillary Clinton was interviewed by noted "liberal hawk", Iraq war booster, and blithering idiot, Jeffrey Goldberg, and she went full Dick Cheney:

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.

Let's be clear. Before Syria turned into a full up civil war, largely at the instigation of the House of Saud, the behavior of the Assad regime was awful, but better than that of Bahrain, whose atrocious behavior was in large part instigated by the House of Saud.

If the Gulf states, particularly the Saudis, had not aggressively shipped weapons and Jihadis to Syria, Syria would pretty much look like Bahrain, a brutal ruthless dictatorship, except that it would not be religiously based.

She continues:

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.

Because doubling down on a failed strategy, is such a good idea.

Then she doubles down on the whole Clash of Civilizations crap:

“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.”

Of course, Osama bin Laden's justifications for his actions largely was that we were making war on Arabs and Islam: (H/t Naked Capitalism for the Link)

As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

And Hillary's solution is to bomb more Muslims and more Arabs.

It should also be noted that she was a big supporter of another Saudi supported bit of failed adventurism, the cluster F%$# that was the nation state of Libya.

Over at Salon, Joan Walsh wonders if the faction of the Democratic party that doesn't need settle their manhood issues with bombs might be an impediment to her coronation as the Democratic Nominee in 2016.  (She actually hopes that it won't, because ……… I dunno. She makes no coherent case at all for voting Hillary.)

As an aside, I am so glad that I live in Maryland. My vote for president does not matter, so I feel no compulsion to cast a vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter how retrograde.