Which brings me to the opportunistic criticism. It’s been thoroughly enjoyable watching a media establishment force itself to remember that Hillary Clinton never liked or respected Obama even before he dared to steal away from her the one job for which she’d been preparing all her sentient life. There was a time when journalists seemed to know instinctively that Clinton would have done, and indeed did do, everything in her power to keep an upstart freshman senator out of the Oval Office. It was she, after all, who suggested that her black rival might be assassinated just as Robert Kennedy had been before the California primary in 1968 – and this by way of justifying her continuance in the 2008 primary long after it was clear that her day was over. It was her husband who, in lobbying the now-dead Ted Kennedy to endorse his wife, suggested to the Massachusetts liberal that Obama was more suited to the White House role of Lee Daniels. “[A] few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Bill Clinton said – or at least that’s how a Kennedy friend relayed the remark to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, authors of the campaign biography Game Change. That book also made clear that the first female politician to circulate the association between Obama and his fellow Chicagoan Bill Ayers was Clinton, at a primary debate in Philadelphia in April 2008, to be exact. In other words, long before Sarah Palin made her more infamous crack about Obama’s “palling around” with a domestic terrorist from the Weather Underground.
But for a while there, Madame Secretary had us going. All that enmity and plotting was evidently water over the Mosul Dam. She played the dutiful and unprovocative top diplomat who kept her own counsel about her boss’s manifest shortcomings in order to cultivate the necessary resume to become his successor. As the IS takes over more of Iraq and Syria and threatens the Yazidis with extermination – or more importantly, as Obama’s foreign policy approval ratings hit the Bushland territory of the high 30s – Clinton has finally been able to speak her mind. In an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, she tossed Obama under a jihadist-driven Humvee, and now of course professes to have done no such thing. The failure to arm the moderate Syrian opposition, she said, brought us to where we are now, and this is a real shame because that opposition was well known to America from the beginning of the revolution. Well, Robert Ford, another defector from the administration, made much the same point a few months ago. But Clinton had gone further in mischaracterizing the rebels; she formerly described them paradoxically as inscrutable and/or possibly akin to Hamas or al-Qaeda, and yet now she states with confidence that “there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle.” Moreover, Obama’s flippant foreign policy doctrine – “don’t do stupid shit” – she considers not an “organizing principle” befitting of a great nation such as the United States, which after all defeated both fascism and communism in the 20th century. “Peace, progress, and prosperity” is her preferred slogan for 2016.
It’s not that I disagree with Clinton’s substantive points; I’ve been making them myself for much longer than she has. It’s that she plainly held these opinions at a time when someone of her stature’s airing them publicly might have actually mattered. Instead, she chose not to break ranks or quit a government she thought was headed for calamity, and I’m sure I could unearth those who would argue, in all earnestness, that she chose this course because she felt she should stay and fight her corner to influence policy, not because causing a necessary scandal within the Democratic Party would complicate her future ambitions.
Plenty of correctives to US screw-ups in the Middle East have been written in the last few weeks, but none, I think, has addressed a more overriding problem that three long years of covering the Syria conflict has made me intimately acquainted with. American politicians still think people in faraway lands are just as stupid as their own constituents at home and therefore cannot discern the difference between someone telling the truth and someone trying to get ahead. “Why do they hate us? Why are they so conspiratorially-minded? How do we convince them that we’re on their side?” The current news cycle would be a good place to start answering those questions.
