Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy “killed hundreds of thousands”

There will be some who say Trump has a point, but the Iraq issue can’t just be pinned on keeping U.S. troops in the country. The strategy used by leaders like General David Petraeus during the “surge” was horrific because all it did was give weapons to Sunnis. Those same Sunnis are now supporting ISIS. ISIS also got more power because former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki decided to crack down on Sunni dissent. Saddam Hussein was Sunni, while Maliki is Shiite. The chaos was going to come one way or another, so just blaming Obama and Clinton doesn’t really work. Nor does it work to blame George W. Bush for going to War with Iraq in the first place. The U.S. policy in the Middle East has been muddled for decades.

You throw out this simplistic quote-analysis-unquote as if it’s both obvious and unquestionable. While I’m certainly not going to claim that the Bush administration got everything right in Iraq, the surge was exactly what needed to happen. Obama’s mishandling of the aftermath does not make the surge wrong.

And yes, Obama is to be blamed, and Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State at the time. They took a hard-won stabilized Iraq and turned it into a basket case. Maliki was already trying to crack down on Sunni dissenters during the Bush administration, which was restraining him. It was when Obama tried to wash his hands of Iraq that Maliki went whole hog on punishing the Sunnis that were supposed to be his own countrymen. With no American troops in Iraq, we had no real influence with him. That’s doubly true when the reason there were no American troops in Iraq at all was because the Obama administration didn’t want to do the necessary diplomacy and negotiation with the Iraqi government. Iraq knew quite well that we were walking away from them, and that they were on their own.

You can debate how well or how badly the Bush administration handled Iraq, but never let there be the slightest doubt that it was the Obama administration that created the current situation. The CIA during the Cold War may have been bastards at times. They may have propped up dictators who were not that much better than the opposition. But they never deliberately destabilized governments while letting the nations descend into chaos.

And that was the entire goal of the so-called Arab Spring: to destabilize governments in the Middle East and hope democracy sprang up in its place.

For example, when a tyrant like Moammar Khaddafi renounced terrorism and started cooperating with the US, the old CIA would have left Libya alone as long as they were behaving. Obama and Hillary pushed him out of power when he was no longer a threat and turned Libya into a new opportunity for Al Qaeda and their ilk.

Obama. Owns. This. Mess.

And so does Hillary.

There Goes the Neighborhood on December 14, 2015 at 3:35 AM

Bush killed hundreds of thousands, the fact is, most every president and secretary of state, you could make that stupid comment.

Liberals say that about conservatives on a regular basis…we have killed hundreds of thousands…and of course conservatives say that about Planned Parenthood, it’s just that, that is actually done on our soil by “our” people.

In this case, he just used the wrong words, he could have worded it better.

Alone, no big deal, but put it together with all of his other “misstatements” and he is a walking talking disaster.

right2bright on December 14, 2015 at 9:49 AM

There’s a big difference between killing people who are trying to kill you in a war, and policies that cause the death of people unnecessarily.

Does anyone really think Trump was blaming Hillary for deaths in the Iraq war, or in the war in Afghanistan?

No, he was rather obviously talking about unnecessary deaths caused by flawed foreign policy.

His statement may be debatable, but it is not obviously wrong. Hundreds of thousands have died in the Middle East because of the misbegotten “Arab Spring” policy. Ordinarily, I would blame the man at the top who sets the policy, but it’s quite clear that Hillary was an enthusiastic participant based on her part in funneling weapons to Syrian rebels from Libya. So I’d have to agree that she at least shares the blame.

The awkward thing in this statement is not that Trump engaged in some hyperbole. The awkward thing here is that it’s not hyperbole at all.

There Goes the Neighborhood on December 14, 2015 at 10:45 AM