Hillary Clinton Criticizes President Obama “Failure” on Syria

Hillary Clinton criticized her former boss President Barack Obama in a new interview, citing the “failure” of his administration to contain the spread of Islamic jihadists in Syria who are now marching through Iraq.

Clinton was Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. She ran against him for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. The former U.S. senator from New York now is considered the leading candidate for the 2016 nomination and the interview part of her move to distance herself from Obama’s policies.

“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 in the interview.

“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,” Clinton said in the interview. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand. Their raison d’être 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.”

Clinton also strongly defended Israel’s actions against Hamas in Gaza, according to the interview.

Agencies/Canadajournal