IMO this is a very important article. The writer is a Clinton operative who is trying to damn Barry and praise Hilarious at every opportunity...all in preparation for her 2016 run. Hilarious must inoculate herself from all of Barry’s screw-ups both before and after she left the Administration.
Right before commenting on Benghazi killings the writer explains that during the campaign all foreign policy events were framed with political spin and damage control by hacks in the White House...which is how the “video” narrative was created. The writer fails to mention that Hilarious went along with the talking points.
Key passages from the article:
“Holbrooke never succeeded. Clinton did — but it was often a battle. It usually happened only when it finally became clear to a White House that jealously guarded all foreign policymaking — and then relied heavily on the military and intelligence agencies to guide its decisions — that these agencies’ solutions were no substitute for the type of patient, credible diplomacy that garners the respect and support of allies. Time and again, when things seemed to be falling apart, the administration finally turned to Clinton because it knew she was the only person who could save the situation.
“One could argue that in most administrations, an inevitable imbalance exists between the military-intelligence complex, with its offerings of swift, dynamic, camera-ready action, and the foreign-policy establishment, with its seemingly ponderous, deliberative style. But this administration advertised itself as something different. On the campaign trail, Obama repeatedly stressed that he wanted to get things right in the broader Middle East, reversing the damage that had resulted from the previous administration’s reliance on faulty intelligence and its willingness to apply military solutions to problems it barely understood.
“Not only did that not happen, but the president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans. The Obama administration’s reputation for competence on foreign policy has less to do with its accomplishments in Afghanistan or the Middle East than with how U.S. actions in that region have been reshaped to accommodate partisan political concerns.
“By September 2012, when violent anti-American protests swept the Muslim world, claiming the lives of four members of the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya and dozens of demonstrators, it became clear that we had gotten the broader Middle East badly wrong.”
Lordy, lordy, these people are slow learners.
Hillary has the Herculean task of separating herself from Obama’s actions while not trashing his politics.
Thank you. The site requires a signin and I couldn’t view the rest of the article.
We never hear of Afghanistan , or Iraq anymore, not in the news. Zero is an utter disaster. And if the point of the article is to sing the praises of Clinton, then I don’t want to read it. People died needlessly on her watch and she LIED about it. That is all I need to know.
“Holbrooke never succeeded. Clinton did...”
Yep, that’s the point in the article when I started smelling a rat...