WarSclerotic

Hillary ‘Leaving No Daylight’ Between Herself and Israel

Hillary defends Israel, distances herself from Obama’s foreign policy “failure”

8.11.2014 Israel Revolt Bradford Thomas

via Hillary ‘Leaving No Daylight’ Between Herself and Israel | Truth Revolt.

 

In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Hillary Clinton attempted to leave “no daylight between the Israelis and herself.” Despite her frequent criticism of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu during her time as secretary of state, Clinton declared her adamant support of Israel’s Gaza campaign, as the rift between the country and the Obama administration grows.

On her support of Israel:

I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets. 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.

On whether Israel has done enough to prevent the deaths of innocent Gazans:

[J]ust as we try to do in the United States and be as careful as possible in going after targets to avoid civilians [mistakes are made.] We’ve made them. I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are—and I think that democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a conflict position—that hasn’t made errors, but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas.

As Goldberg states, Clinton’s “vociferous defense” of Israel is noteworthy because when she was serving 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, Clinton is “leaving no daylight at all between the Israelis and herself.”

Her statements on Israel were part of a larger trend in the discussion with Goldberg in which she deliberately distanced herself from President Obama in terms more dramatic than any of her previous statements, including highlighting Obama’s foreign policy “failure” in Syria and his culpability in allowing the rise of ISIS in Iraq.

On Obama’s foreign policy “failure” in the Middle East:

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. […]

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. 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.

On Obama’s “Don’t do stupid sh*t” foreign policy slogan:

Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle.

At one moment in the interview, Clinton basically told Goldberg that she was going to run in 2016, saying about whether her optimistic views of America were too “old-fashioned,” “I’m about to find out, in more ways than one.”

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This entry was posted on August 11, 2014 at 5:15 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Anti Semitism, Clinton, Gaza war, Hamas, IDF, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Palestinians, USA

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