Parsing Hillary Clinton's Disingenuous Foreign Policy Record
Senator Sanders questioned Secretary Clinton's judgment in voting in support of a war with Iraq back in 2002, and furthered the issue of poor judgement by highlighting her support of policies promoting regime change in Libya and Syria since then, noting that such policies, while playing well to public sentiment, often have unintended consequences that prove to be far worse than the problem they ostensibly sought to resolve. Hillary Clinton responded by declaring "a vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS."
In keeping with her overall strategy of wrapping herself in the record of President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton noted that President Obama trusted her judgement on foreign policy enough to select her as his first Secretary of State. Senator Sander's protestations over her policy choices in Libya and Syria, and her approach toward resolving differences with Iran, seemed to fall on deaf ears.
A closer examination of the issues raised during the debate, in particular the decision to bomb Libya and remove the regime of President Muammar Gaddafi, the ongoing debacle unfolding inside Syria, and the recently concluded Iranian nuclear agreement, only underscore the reality that Senator Sanders, far from being weak on foreign policy matters, was right to question both the judgement of Hillary Clinton when it came to foreign policy and national security issues and her record as Secretary of State.
The decision by the Obama administration to intervene in Libya was both indefensible as policy and legally questionable in terms of international law. The United Nations resolution authorizing the imposition of a "no fly zone" did not contain any language that could sustain the notion of expanding the "no fly zone" into a general aerial bombardment of Libya designed to remove Gaddafi from power -- the United States, Great Britain and France were compelled to turn to NATO to provide some semblance of diplomatic cover for that operation.
Even if one accepts the morally unsupportable notion that the ends justify the means, the rapid decline of Libya from a relatively stable nation state run by a repressive yet containable dictator (Gaddafi) to the chaotic morass of Islamist-infused anarchy that exists today makes even that contention moot -- there can be no doubt that Libya and the world was better off with Gaddafi in charge.
MORE: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-ritter/hillary-clinton-foreign-policy-record_b_9221284.html
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