Hillary Clinton all but announced her run for president while bashing President Barack Obama's foreign policy in an interview for The Atlantic. The former Secretary of State made a concerted effort to distance herself from Obama and his "Don't do stupid stuff" policy.
"Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle," she told the monthly magazine. "It may be a necessary brake on the actions you might take in order to promote a vision."
Her greatest argument involved Obama's handling of the crisis in Syria. The war-torn country has suffered more than 170,000 deaths, a third of them civilians, during its three-year civil war, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"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 told The Atlantic.
She wouldn't directly connect the rise of the extremist group ISIS in the region to the United States' failure to make greater efforts to help the Syrian opposition. As Secretary of State, Clinton said she advocated to "carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army."
"I know that 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," she said.
