podesta_email_01496.txt

podesta-emails 9,177 words email

D6 P17 P22 V11 D8

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*[image: Inline image 1]* *Correct The Record Tuesday August 12, 2014 Morning Roundup:* *Headlines:* *New York Times: “Attacking Obama Policy, Hillary Clinton Exposes Different Worldviews” <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/world/middleeast/attacking-obama-policy-hillary-clinton-exposes-different-worldviews.html>* “As Mrs. Clinton stakes out her own foreign policy positions in advance of a possible campaign for the White House, there are likely to be other cases where her statements do not seem entirely in sync with her record as secretary of state.” *Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton criticizes President Obama’s foreign policy in interview with the Atlantic” <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-criticizes-president-obamas-foreign-policy-in-interview-with-the-atlantic/2014/08/11/46d30564-2170-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html>* “Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet said whether she will pursue the presidency. But for a candidate-in-waiting, she is clearly carving out a foreign policy distinct from the man she used to serve.” *Politico Magazine: “Saving Syria Is No ‘Fantasy’” <http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/mr-president-saving-syria-is-no-fantasy-109923_Page2.html#.U-nt5_ldV8E>* [Subtitle:] “Hillary Clinton’s former adviser says Obama stood alone against calls to arm the rebels.” *New York Times column: David Brooks: “Clinton, Obama and Iraq” <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/opinion/david-brooks-clinton-obama-and-iraq.html>* “If you don’t take steady, aggressive preventive action, of the sort that Clinton leans toward, then you end up compelled to take the sort of large risky action that Obama abhors.” *Politico: “Jeffrey Goldberg: Hillary Clinton line seemed like ‘shot’ at President Obama” <http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/jeffrey-goldberg-hillary-clinton-interview-109915.html>* “‘Hillary hedged in this interview,’ Goldberg told Andrea Mitchell. ‘And she’s not attacking the president, but I think she felt like, ‘You know what, I thought this, and I think events are bearing out the truth of what I advocated for.’’” *Talking Points Memo blog: TPM Editor’s Blog: “Hillary's Delicate, Dangerous Game” <http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hillarys-delicate-dangerous-game>* “Quite apart from the pros and cons of particular foreign policy strategies, I believe the great majority of partisan Democrats feel protective of the President. So it's a delicate, perilous thing to criticize him so publicly, particularly at a politically vulnerable moment, especially when the nature of the criticism mirrors that of many of the President's most dogged and aggrieved foes.” *The Hill: “Hillary shows her hawkish side” <http://thehill.com/policy/international/214900-hillary-shows-her-hawkish-side>* "Clinton’s foreign policy differs from Obama’s in that it is “a little more muscular, a little more deliberate and less deliberative,” he added." *The Daily Beast: “Exclusive: Obama Told Lawmakers Criticism of His Syria Policy is 'Horsesh*t'” <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/11/exclusive-obama-told-lawmakers-criticism-of-his-syria-policy-is-horsesh-t.html>* "The argument that America should have done more in Syria, made for years by foreign policy leaders in both parties and several members of Obama’s senior national security team, was brought back to the fore this past weekend." *Capital New York: “Schumer: Hillary would be ‘so happy’ with D.N.C. in Brooklyn” <http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/08/8550538/schumer-hillary-would-be-so-happy-dnc-brooklyn>* “Among the reasons New York's senior senator sees that Brooklyn should get the 2016 Democratic National Convention: The location would suit the party's most likely nominee.” *CBS News: “As Hillary Clinton criticizes Obama, conservatives balk” <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-hillary-clinton-criticizes-obama-conservatives-balk/>* “Criticism of Clinton's remarks was more muted on the left, though some anti-interventionist liberals took issue with her statements.” *Politico: “Karl Rove: Clinton tries to be ‘Goldilocks’” <http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/karl-rove-hillary-clinton-goldilocks-109908.html>* “Karl Rove on Monday characterized Hillary Clinton’s split with the president on foreign affairs as the former secretary of state painting herself as ‘Goldilocks.’” *Articles:* *New York Times: “Attacking Obama Policy, Hillary Clinton Exposes Different Worldviews” <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/world/middleeast/attacking-obama-policy-hillary-clinton-exposes-different-worldviews.html>* By Mark Landler August 11, 2014 For the 19 months since Hillary Rodham Clinton departed as President Obama’s secretary of state, she and Mr. Obama, and their respective aides, have labored to preserve a veneer of unity over how they worked together and how they view the world. On Sunday, that veneer shattered — the victim of Mrs. Clinton’s remarkably blunt interview with the Atlantic correspondent, Jeffrey Goldberg, in which she criticized not just Mr. Obama’s refusal to aid the rebels in Syria but his shorthand description of his entire foreign policy. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Mrs. Clinton said, referring to the line that Mr. Obama has used with aides and reporters to describe his reluctance to inject the United States into messy foreign conflicts. Mrs. Clinton said she assumed the line was more a “political message” for a war-weary American public than his actual worldview — an interpretation that makes her words even more stinging, since “don’t do stupid stuff” was in fact the animating principle for the new foreign policy blueprint that Mr. Obama laid out at West Point in May. That Mrs. Clinton is more hawkish than Mr. Obama is no surprise to anyone who watched a Democratic primary debate in 2008. Her policy differences with the president are well-documented: She favored supplying arms to moderate Syrian rebels, leaving behind a larger residual force in Iraq, and waiting longer before pulling American support for Egypt’s former President Hosni Mubarak during the historic protests in Cairo. What has changed is her readiness to surface those differences and put them in the context of a different worldview. Even her memoir, “Hard Choices,” which she was promoting in her interview with Mr. Goldberg, soft-pedaled the gaps and painted a portrait of her and Mr. Obama in lock step in rebuilding America’s tattered image abroad. Now, though, Mrs. Clinton is suggesting that she and the president hold fundamentally different views of American power: his view cautious, inward-looking, suffused with a sense of limits; hers muscular, optimistic, unabashedly old-fashioned. “You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” Mrs. Clinton said to Mr. Goldberg. “One issue is that we don’t even tell our own story very well these days.” Much of the interview’s resonance is in its timing, coming two days after Mr. Obama authorized airstrikes against Sunni militants in Iraq. Mrs. Clinton’s aides say this was a coincidence; the session was scheduled long before anyone knew about military action. Still, when Mrs. Clinton says “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force” against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria “left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” it suggests Mr. Obama’s refusal to arm the rebels might end up being a singular misjudgment. At the time of the Obama administration’s internal debate over that decision, several officials said, Mrs. Clinton’s advocacy was far less thunderous: the United States had tried every diplomatic channel with Syria, she said, and nothing else had worked, so why not try funneling weapons to the moderate rebels. As Mrs. Clinton stakes out her own foreign policy positions in advance of a possible campaign for the White House, there are likely to be other cases where her statements do not seem entirely in sync with her record as secretary of state. At the end of her tenure, for example, Mrs. Clinton wrote a memo to Mr. Obama recommending that the United States lift its half-century-old trade embargo against Cuba. It was not a position that she seriously advocated while at the State Department, officials said. Mrs. Clinton also dashed off an exit memo warning about President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, which White House aides said was redundant, since his behavior was already clear by then. At the beginning of the administration, she was an enthusiastic proponent of the administration’s attempt to reset relations with Russia. In the interview with The Atlantic, Mrs. Clinton said she had always been in the camp of those who believed that Iran had no right to enrich uranium. Yet in December 2010, she was one of the first American officials to acknowledge publicly, in an interview with the BBC, that Iran could emerge from nuclear negotiations with the right to enrich. Mrs. Clinton is not the only former cabinet member to part company with Mr. Obama on foreign policy. Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, wrote a memoir laced with scathing criticism of the administration’s approach to Afghanistan and other crises. In a New York Times article in April about Mrs. Clinton, Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary and C.I.A. director, said, “The president has made some tough decisions. But it’s been a mixed record, and the concern is, the president defining what America’s role in the world is in the 21st century hasn’t happened.” But because of their long history and Mrs. Clinton’s political future, advisers to her and Mr. Obama have worked especially hard to head off any discord. Her staff gave parts of her memoir to Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, for vetting before publication. And interlocking staffs has been a big factor in that effort. Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s top policy adviser at the State Department, went to work as national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a post that allowed him to convey the White House’s sensitivities to her aides. Mrs. Clinton hired Tommy Vietor, a longtime Obama aide who was the spokesman for the National Security Council, to help with the rollout of her book. Mrs. Clinton’s aides worried that some in the news media might use the book to try to drive a wedge between her and the president; Mr. Vietor’s job was to push back on that effort. While Mr. Obama still speaks periodically with Mrs. Clinton, their staffs communicate more regularly. During the Crimea crisis, the White House chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, invited in several Clinton aides, including Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, for consultations. Mrs. Clinton also checks in by email with senior aides like Mr. Rhodes on issues like Myanmar, in which both have a special interest. Whether that communication will weather Mrs. Clinton’s latest statements remains to be seen. *Washington Post: “Hillary Clinton criticizes President Obama’s foreign policy in interview with the Atlantic” <http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-criticizes-president-obamas-foreign-policy-in-interview-with-the-atlantic/2014/08/11/46d30564-2170-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html>* By Juliet Eilperin August 11, 2014, 8:44 p.m. EDT Former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton has not yet said whether she will pursue the presidency. But for a candidate-in-waiting, she is clearly carving out a foreign policy distinct from the man she used to serve. In the spring, President Obama articulated a philosophy for avoiding dangerous entanglements overseas that was modest in its ambitions and focused on avoiding mistakes. Don’t do stupid things, he said. Now Clinton is offering a blunt retort to that approach, telling an interviewer, “Great nations need organizing principles — and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” The surprisingly direct critique, coming in an interview with the Atlantic, represents Clinton’s most forceful effort yet to distance herself from an unpopular administration ahead of her expected 2016 campaign. It also foreshadows the unusual political challenges facing Clinton as she accentuates her foreign policy credentials while trying to avoid blame for the nation’s defensive posture in an increasingly unstable world. The White House declined to comment on Clinton’s remarks, which came as Iraq has plunged into political turmoil and the United States has launched airstrikes to aid Kurdish forces under siege by the Islamic State militant group. The administration is now grappling with multiple armed conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, making Clinton’s record as the nation’s top diplomat more fraught. Clinton, who has already used her recent memoir, “Hard Choices ,” to apologize for her decision to support the invasion of Iraq in 2002 and to draw some careful distinctions between herself and the administration, provided a more direct assessment in the interview published Sunday. She drew special attention to Obama’s determination to sidestep costly foreign interventions. The president and his aides have referred privately to that strategy in recent months as, “Don’t do stupid s---.” That approach has come under fire from some now that Islamist militants have gained ground overseas. Clinton said the phrase was “a political message” rather than Obama’s “worldview.” Even so, she argued that the United States has to strike a better balance between overreaching in foreign affairs and being so restrained that conflicts can spiral out of hand. “You know, when you’re down on yourself, and when you are hunkering down and pulling back, you’re not going to make any better decisions than when you were aggressively, belligerently putting yourself forward,” Clinton said. Differences on Syria As secretary of state, Clinton backed arming the rebels in Syria’s ongoing civil war. In the new interview, she said, “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against [Bashar al-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 added that she couldn’t be sure whether her preferred course of action would have changed the direction of the war. “I can’t sit here today and say that if we had done what I recommended, and what [former U.S. ambassador to Syria] Robert Ford recommended, that we’d be in a demonstrably different place,” she said. While Clinton and Obama have taken steps since her departure from the administration to present themselves as friends, the two engaged over the weekend in a sort of indirect foreign policy debate — with each sitting for separate interviews with journalists known for their Middle East expertise. Clinton made her comments to the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. Obama, speaking with New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, dismissed the idea that arming the Syrian rebels would have made a difference, saying it has “always been a fantasy.” “This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards,” he added. *Benefits in distance* In an e-mail Monday, an aide to Clinton wrote that the interview was “intended to promote her memoir, and Goldberg was a long-planned-for target on a list of interviews around the book — and not part of an overarching political strategy related to 2016.” Several experts said there is little precedent for a secretary of state preparing a presidential campaign in part by criticizing the foreign policy being carried out by the administration she helped lead. Yet the benefits to Clinton are clear. “It’s in her political interest to begin to distance herself from an unpopular president and to drive home the fact that she’s risk-ready while Obama’s risk-averse,” said Aaron David Miller, vice president for new initiatives at the Wilson Center. Clinton’s comments cheered some Democrats who have become anxious about the threat Islamist militants pose to both stability in the Middle East and U.S. national security. Josh Block, president of the Israel Project, said it is “important” to see a Democratic leader laying out a worldview “that recognizes the role of our values and very real threats and trends facing the U.S. and our allies today.” “It struck me as the reemergence of common sense in Democratic foreign policy after a period of drift and indecision,” Block added. Republican National Committee press secretary Kirsten Kukowski seized on Clinton’s remarks Monday, e-mailing reporters, “good luck to you, Hillary” as she tries to refashion her record. “She’s going to try, because that’s what the ever-calculating, ever-political Clintons do best, but let’s be real, she was the Obama foreign policy for four years,” Kukowski wrote. Shawn Brimley, who served as the National Security Council’s director for strategic planning during Obama’s first term, said he did not see “much of a chasm between where Secretary Clinton is and where the president’s been at some time.” Brimley said it is always easier for those who have left the administration to reflect upon world affairs and articulate an overarching vision than those who are “running on a treadmill at 20 to 30 miles an hour.” Still, Clinton’s remarks appear to be carefully calibrated, the latest example of a deliberate distancing from her former colleagues. Syria, for example, was not the only issue in which Clinton had a more interventionist view than Obama. Along with then-Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, she advocated sending more troops to Afghanistan. Clinton also wrote in the book that when it came to the Arab Spring, she and other senior advisers — including Gates and Vice President Biden — were not “swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment” like other, younger White House aides when it came to ousting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. *Politico Magazine: “Saving Syria Is No ‘Fantasy’” <http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/mr-president-saving-syria-is-no-fantasy-109923_Page2.html#.U-nt5_ldV8E>* By Frederic Hof, former special advisor for transition in Syria at the U.S. Department of State August 11, 2014 [Subtitle:] Hillary Clinton’s former adviser says Obama stood alone against calls to arm the rebels. In June 2014, the Obama administration asked Congress for $500 million to train and equip nationalist Syrian rebels battling both the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Assad regime. Questions were posed then about the genuineness of the gesture: The request was emailed to Capitol Hill rather than made in person; it was unaccompanied by visits or telephone calls; there were no follow-up consultations; there was no order to the Department of Defense to reprogram funds to initiate activity quickly; and there was no evidence of an existing plan or overall strategy. Two months later, those questions seem to have been answered by the president of the United States. He says that arming nationalist Syrian rebels was never going to work anyway. In an interview with the New York Times on Aug. 8, President Obama said the notion that ISIL’s rise could have been stopped or hindered if he had armed the secular, more Western-friendly Syrian rebels at the start of the civil war—a view recently endorsed by his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton—“has always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.’” Ironically, in the same interview the president also defended the U.S.-supported NATO military intervention in Libya on the grounds that without it, “it’s likely that Libya would be Syria.” One wonders if Syria itself would “be Syria” had its armed nationalists been adequately supported since 2012 and had the Assad regime’s mass terror-delivery systems been neutralized in the summer of 2013 following the chemical-weapons atrocity, when more than 1,400 people were killed in an attack outside Damascus. No doubt the president is sensitive to the charge that his rejection of the 2012 recommendation by his national security team to arm and equip nationalist Syrian rebels robustly has contributed significantly, if inadvertently, to ISIL’s growth in both Syria and Iraq. His comments to Friedman implicitly dismiss the 2012 recommendation itself as a fantasy, but as Secretary Clinton’s Syria adviser I was a member of the administration at that time. The recommendation, in one form or another, was offered not only by Clinton, but by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey. Yet the president, ignoring decades of universal conscription and mandatory military service in Syria, persists in characterizing the Assad regime’s armed opponents as a hopeless collection of former butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. What is truly curious, however, is the request to Congress for $500 million to finance what the president deems a fantasy. Indeed, if press reports are true that the United States is already involved in some low-level arming, equipping and training of Syrian rebels, one wonders how many taxpayer dollars have already been spent on something the commander-in-chief deems illusory. What is Congress now to make of this $500 million request? What are military planners at the U.S. Central Command to make of the midnight oil they have been burning trying to give shape to something they thought was real? What exactly was the purpose of whatever interagency process produced the $500 million initiative in the first place? Perhaps the president misspoke or was inaccurately quoted. Perhaps he meant to argue that his 2012 decision was correct, but that the rise of ISIL has been a game-changer, and this is why he is seeking $500 million from Congress: to accelerate, despite all of the difficulties, the development of an alternative to Assad and the jihadis. Perhaps he really meant only to repeat his customary straw-man argument: Those who claim Assad would be gone today if only a different decision had been made in 2012 are wrong. One prays this is the case. Congress, mercifully in recess, now has a choice: Take the president literally and summarily reject the $500 million request; or give the president the benefit of the doubt as to his choice of words and deliver the kind of serious consideration the request merits. It should choose the latter. When it returns to session it should invite senior administration officials to testify about the national security objectives and strategy motivating the request. Obama, for his part, should move quickly to clarify his remarks to convey that he is not asking Congress to throw money at a policy he doesn’t believe in. American pilots are now engaging ISIL targets in northern Iraq to support Kurdish peshmerga warriors. Syrian nationalists battling ISIL next door have long since given up on getting that kind of direct combat support from the United States. In the past, President Obama’s words about a dictator who should step aside and red lines that are not to be crossed encouraged the Syrian opposition to believe that the United States would not permit Iranian and Russian support for mass homicide to go unanswered. They have grown deeply disappointed, disillusioned and embittered. Yet they have held out against steep odds. Evidently, they never got the memo about successful resistance not being in the cards. These people do not, in their dire straits, need a presidential back-of-the-hand, even one that may not have been meant as such. They need help in their two-way fight: help in downing regime helicopters bearing barrel bombs dropped indiscriminately on civilians, and help in repulsing and expelling the jihadis’ terror squads. Had the requisite assistance started flowing two years ago, both Syria and Iraq would be in better places now. Fantasy? Few in the administration—including at very senior levels—think so. But the president has the only vote that counts. And what he does now—not what he did or failed to do two years ago—is what truly matters. *New York Times column: David Brooks: “Clinton, Obama and Iraq” <http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/opinion/david-brooks-clinton-obama-and-iraq.html>* By David Brooks August 11, 2014 Last week, Hillary Clinton had a fascinating interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic. The interview got immediate attention because of the way she discussed her differences with President Obama. While admitting that no one will ever know who was right, Clinton argues that Obama might have done more to help the moderate opposition in Syria fight the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad ... left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” she told Goldberg. While showing lavish respect for the president’s intelligence and judgment, Clinton also made it clear that she’d be a more aggressive foreign policy leader. “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said, citing Obama’s famous phrase. But the interview also illuminates the different flavors of Democratic thinking on foreign policy. We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq. The last four presidents have found themselves drawn into that nation because it epitomizes the core problem at the center of so many crises: the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam. In her interview with Goldberg, Clinton likens the current moment to the Cold War. The U.S. confronts a diverse global movement, motivated by a hostile ideology: jihadism. “Jihadist groups are governing territory. They will never stay there, though. They are driven to expand.” This jihadism shows up in many contexts, but whether in Gaza or Syria or Iraq, she says, “it is all one big threat.” Clinton speaks as a Truman-Kennedy Democrat. She’s obviously much, much more multilateral than Republicans, but there’s a certain muscular tone, a certain assumption that there will be hostile ideologies that threaten America. There is also a grand strategic cast to her mind. The U.S. has to come up with an “overarching” strategy, she told Goldberg, to contain, deter and defeat anti-democratic foes. She argues that harsh action is sometimes necessary. “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets, “ she declared, embracing recent Israeli policy. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict. ... So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas.” This tone sometimes stands in tension with the approach President Obama articulated in his West Point speech in the spring, or in his interview with my colleague Thomas Friedman on Friday. Obama has carefully not organized a large part of his foreign policy around a war against jihadism. The foreign policy vision he describes is, as you’d expect from a former law professor, built around reverence for certain procedures: compromise, inclusiveness, rules and norms. The threat he described in his West Point speech was a tactic, terrorism, not an ideology, jihadism. His main argument was against a means not an end: the efficacy of military action. Obama is notably cautious, arguing that the U.S. errs when it tries to do too much. The cast of his mind is against intervention. Sometimes, when the situation demands it, he goes against his natural temperament (he told Friedman that he regrets not getting more involved in Libya), but it takes a mighty shove, and he is resistant all the way. In his West Point speech, he erected barriers to action. He argued, for example, that the U.S. could take direct action only when “there is near certainty of no civilian casualties.” (This is not a standard Franklin Roosevelt would have applied.) Obama and Clinton represent different Democratic tendencies. In their descriptions of the current situation in Iraq, Clinton emphasizes that there cannot be inclusive politics unless the caliphate is seriously pushed back, while Obama argues that we will be unable to push back the caliphate unless the Iraqis themselves create inclusive politics. The Clinton language points toward some sort of intervention. Obama’s points away from it, though he may be forced by events into being more involved. It will be fascinating to see how Clinton’s approach plays in Democratic primaries. (I’d bet she is going to get a more serious challenge than people now expect.) In practice, the Clinton approach strikes me as more sound, for the same reason that early intervention against cancer is safer than late-term surgery. In the Middle East, malevolent groups like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria grow unless checked. Even in situations where our “friends” are dysfunctional, the world has to somehow check them, using a multitude of levers. Having done so little in Syria and Iraq for the past year, we can end the caliphate or we can stay out of Iraq, but we can’t do both. If you don’t take steady, aggressive preventive action, of the sort that Clinton leans toward, then you end up compelled to take the sort of large risky action that Obama abhors. *Politico: “Jeffrey Goldberg: Hillary Clinton line seemed like ‘shot’ at President Obama” <http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/jeffrey-goldberg-hillary-clinton-interview-109915.html>* By Jonathan Topaz August 11, 2014, 2:02 p.m. EDT Jeffrey Goldberg on Monday dissected his interview with Hillary Clinton, saying she took “a bit of a shot” at President Barack Obama and his foreign policy. Appearing on MSNBC, the Atlantic journalist who interviewed Clinton was asked about the former secretary of State’s comments that an Obama foreign policy quip — “Don’t do stupid stuff” — was not an adequate “organizing principle.” “[W]hen she says, that’s not an organizing principle — and people understand that to be one of Barack Obama’s organizing principles — it does seem like a bit of a shot,” Goldberg said. He added that her comments on the issue underscore a significant stylistic difference between Obama and Clinton, who served in the administration during the president’s first term. “What she’s saying is that, ‘My organizing principle is, we defeated Communism and we’re going to defeat jihadism,’” Goldberg said of Clinton. “Barack Obama, as you well know, is allergic to that kind of sweeping language.” The interview, conducted last week and published over the weekend, was perhaps Clinton’s largest break from Obama, whom she has strongly supported since leaving the State Department. On Syria — in what Goldberg called the “single sharpest point of disagreement” between Clinton and Obama expressed in the interview — she suggested that the president’s failure to arm the Syrian rebels earlier in the conflict helped created a security “vacuum” now filled by jihadists. Goldberg said that Clinton, who advocated a more hawkish foreign policy on several issues during her time in the Cabinet, might feel “vindicated in her position” that the U.S. should have intervened in Syria earlier. “Hillary hedged in this interview,” Goldberg told Andrea Mitchell. “And she’s not attacking the president, but I think she felt like, ‘You know what, I thought this, and I think events are bearing out the truth of what I advocated for.’” Mitchell asked Goldberg about Clinton and Obama’s differences on Israel, noting that Clinton seemed to be more resolutely siding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Hillary doesn’t think that differently [from Obama],” he said. “I think she’s running for president and he’s not and she knows that Israel remains, according to polls, a popular cause in America.” Goldberg added that Clinton’s more unequivocal answer supporting Israel lacked some “nuance,” adding that her message to the U.S. public and Netanyahu was: “[Obama] had a tough relationship with Israel; I’m going to have a smoother relationship with Israel.” *Talking Points Memo blog: TPM Editor’s Blog: “Hillary's Delicate, Dangerous Game” <http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/hillarys-delicate-dangerous-game>* By Josh Marshall August 11, 2014, 10:56 p.m. EDT Let's start by affirming a few points. After a bruising and devastating defeat to Barack Obama in 2008, Hillary Clinton went on to serve his administration ably, loyally and well for four years. It's also true that it's entirely natural for a future presidential aspirant to find ways to separate herself from the current president, especially one with flagging popularity. Indeed, it is incumbent on a would-be president to make clear what she would have done differently and what she would do if she were elected. As President Clinton has said many times, elections are always about the future. But there's an element of Hillary's strategic distancing I've not seen widely mentioned. President Obama is not popular at the moment. His popularity is at best in the low 40s. But among the people who choose Democratic nominees - that is, partisan Democrats - he remains quite popular. And even for many Democrats who feel disappointed, let down or just worn out by the whole six year journey, President Obama represents something that transcends how they may feel about him at just this moment. Quite apart from the pros and cons of particular foreign policy strategies, I believe the great majority of partisan Democrats feel protective of the President. So it's a delicate, perilous thing to criticize him so publicly, particularly at a politically vulnerable moment, especially when the nature of the criticism mirrors that of many of the President's most dogged and aggrieved foes. The particular nature of the supposed disagreement adds to the equation. Remember that Sen. Clinton's hawkishness - summed up by her Iraq War vote but expressed on various fronts during her six years in the Senate - was a significant reason she lost her primary fight against Obama in 2008. And that's matched by what seems to be an effort on Hillary's part today to position herself as the candidate of what might be termed the moderate wing of the neoconservative foreign policy intelligentsia. Both the positioning and the substance of the positioning hearken back to what undid Hillary in 2007-08. Indeed, there's one more thread: the sense, critical in 2007-08, that Hillary had become a creature of Washington, its factions, its consultants, its conventional wisdoms so impervious to outside influence. I don't pretend any of this is likely to derail her. She's phenomenally popular and for good reason among Democrats and beats all comers in the general. But it all threatens to crystallize a mix of traits many Democrats grew suspicious of in 2008 and could led to a catalyzing if not successful primary challenge to her in 2016. Perhaps more than anything, as a political matter, once you loose these memes and mini-controversies, you don't necessarily control them. The Murdoch press, aggrieved frenemies, Fox News, MSNBC, the Sunday Show crowd do with them what they will. Which is half the point, of course. But not necessarily as you planned. *The Hill: “Hillary shows her hawkish side” <http://thehill.com/policy/international/214900-hillary-shows-her-hawkish-side>* By Peter Sullivan August 12, 2014, 6:00 a.m. EDT Hillary Clinton is staking out a more hawkish foreign policy stance than President Obama as she moves toward a run for the presidency in 2016. From Syria to Israel to Iran, Clinton is beginning to draw contrasts with the man she served under as secretary of State. “It’s a decision on her part to remind people of where she’s coming from and how that’s different,” said Jon Alterman, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Clinton’s foreign policy differs from Obama’s in that it is “a little more muscular, a little more deliberate and less deliberative,” he added. The strongest break came over the weekend, when in an interview Clinton criticized Obama’s “failure to help build up a credible fighting force” in Syria while faulting his foreign policy approach in broad strokes. "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle," she told The Atlantic. Clinton aides said the interview was part of her book tour, and not about the 2016 campaign or any political strategy. Nonetheless, the remark could be the start of a more aggressive effort by Clinton to distance herself from Obama’s foreign policy, which scored an approval rating of just 36 percent in the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. But shaking off her association with the president could be a tall order, given that she helped shape major policy decisions from within his Cabinet. Republicans eyeing a presidential run in 2016 have begun to make the link between Obama and Clinton a point of attack. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over the weekend blamed the “failures of the Obama-Clinton foreign policies” for the rise of Sunni militants in Iraq. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), another rising GOP star, criticized Clinton for backing the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011. “There are some who call Libya ‘Hillary’s war.’ She was all for it. . … And if you look objectively at Libya now, it’s a jihadist wonderland there,” he told The Washington Post earlier this month. And Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told CNBC that under the Obama administration there has been “chaos all over the world,” with Clinton “at the State Department while all this was happening.” Clinton has stressed that she often disagreed with the president’s policy moves, most notably on Syria, where she failed to persuade him of the need to arm rebel fighters. “We pushed very hard,” Clinton told CNN in June. “But as I say in my book, I believe that Harry Truman was right, the buck stops with the president. And the president had very legitimate concerns.” Obama, by contrast, told Thomas Friedman of The New York Times last week the idea that arming the Syrian rebels would have made a difference in the conflict is a “fantasy.” Clinton has also begun to diverge on the conflict in Gaza. The administration has repeatedly criticized Israel for not doing enough to prevent civilian casualties, earlier this month stating that the United States was “appalled” by the shelling of a United Nations school in Gaza. Clinton took a different tack. Asked by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “Do you think Israel did enough to limit civilian casualties?” Clinton responded, “It’s unclear. I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets.” She went on to criticize the international reaction against Israel, adding, “You can’t ever discount anti-Semitism as an explanation.” The daylight on policy extends to Iran, where Clinton has aired doubts about the ongoing nuclear talks. “President Obama has said that the odds of getting a comprehensive agreement are 50-50,” Clinton said in May. “I personally am skeptical that the Iranians will follow through and deliver.” Clinton and Obama famously clashed on Iran during the 2008 campaign when Obama said he would be willing to meet with then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without preconditions.” Clinton at the time called the position “irresponsible and frankly naïve.” Clinton’s criticism of Obama is not as sharp-edged now. While critiquing Obama’s “Don't do stupid stuff” mantra, she cautioned that it doesn’t encapsulate Obama’s full policy approach. “I think that that’s a political message,” she said. “It’s not his worldview, if that makes sense to you.” Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Clinton was not diverging on policy, but instead making a point about how Obama’s motto could leave U.S. foreign policy without a “clear voice.” “It’s more disagreeing with the messaging,” said O’Hanlon, who has co-authored a new book with James Steinberg, Clinton’s deputy secretary of State. Clinton told The Atlantic her organizing principle is “peace, progress and prosperity,” and emphasized the role of ensuring domestic prosperity to win support for foreign policy. “You’ve got to take care of your home first,” she said. *The Daily Beast: “Exclusive: Obama Told Lawmakers Criticism of His Syria Policy is 'Horsesh*t'” <http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/11/exclusive-obama-told-lawmakers-criticism-of-his-syria-policy-is-horsesh-t.html>* By Josh Rogin August 11, 2014 [Subtitle:] Hillary Clinton and congressmen alike have called on Obama to arm Syria’s rebels. But the president fumed at lawmakers in a private meeting for suggesting he should’ve done more. President Obama got angry at lawmakers who suggested in a private meeting that he should have armed the Syrian rebels, calling the criticism “horseshit.” The argument that America should have done more in Syria, made for years by foreign policy leaders in both parties and several members of Obama’s senior national security team, was brought back to the fore this past weekend. Obama and Hillary Clinton gave dueling interviews in which they publicly split on whether the security and humanitarian catastrophe in Syria could have been avoided if the United States had played a larger role. Obama’s outburst on July 31, one week prior, reveals the criticism was already getting to him, even before the White House tried to deflect Clinton’s remarks as pre-presidential political posturing. Just before the Congressional recess, President Obama invited over a dozen Senate and House leaders from both parties to the White House to talk about foreign policy. According to two lawmakers inside the meeting, Obama became visibly agitated when confronted by bipartisan criticism of the White House’s policy of slow-rolling moderate Syrian rebels’ repeated requests for arms to fight the Assad regime and ISIS. According to one of the lawmakers, Sen. Bob Corker asked the President a long question that included sharp criticisms of President Obama’s handling of a number of foreign policy issues—including Syria, ISIS, Russia, and Ukraine. Obama answered Corker at length. Then, the president defended his administration’s actions on Syria, saying that the notion that many have put forth regarding arming the rebels earlier would have led to better outcomes in Syria was “horseshit.” White House officials confirmed the charged exchange between Obama and Corker but declined to confirm that Obama used the expletive. The interaction between Obama and Corker was a tense moment in the otherwise uneventful meeting. Corker’s office declined to comment for this story. But days after the White House meeting, he wrote a blistering op-ed for the Washington Post criticizing Obama’s handling of foreign policy. “Today, after three years of bold rhetoric divorced from reality, 170,000 Syrians are dead, and we are not innocent bystanders. The president encouraged the opposition to swallow deadly risks, then left them mostly hanging,” the senator wrote. “Extremist groups from Syria have surged into Iraq, seizing key territory and resources, and are threatening to completely undo the progress of years of U.S. sacrifice.” Top Democratic lawmakers agreed with Corker and Clinton that doing more to support the moderate rebels would have at least had a chance of averting or mitigating the current crisis, which has now spread to large parts of Iraq as ISIS expands its newly declared Caliphate. Rep. Elliot Engel, the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, arrived at the White House meeting after the Obama-Corker exchange. But the congressman also heard Obama defend his Syria policy, although using more polite language. “The president still feels very strongly that we are deluding ourselves if we think American intervention in Syria early on by assisting these rebels would have made a difference,” Engel told The Daily Beast in an interview. “He still believes that. I disagree, respectfully. They were not looking for U.S. troops, they were looking for help and the Syria civil war started with the most noblest of causes.” In a New York Times interview published Aug. 8, Obama said that the idea arming the rebels would have made a difference had “always been a fantasy.” “This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards,” Obama said. Clinton told The Atlantic in an interview published Aug. 10 that Obama’s “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.” In 2012, Clinton revealed that she and then-CIA Director David Petraeus had pushed a plan earlier that year to arm the Syrian rebels that was rejected by the White House. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey later said they supported the plan at that time. Many lawmakers, including Corker and Engel, still support that plan and they agree with Clinton that Obama’s policy left a vacuum that ISIS rushed to fill. “[ISIS’s threat in Iraq] is definitely tied to Syria because when the uprising started against Bashar al Assad, it was a movement of people wanting freedom and democracy in Syria, it wasn’t a war involving jihadism at all,” Engel said. “They desperately needed our help, which we didn’t supply, and as a result ISIS got the upper hand. We are now paying the price of that.” Not all lawmakers support arming the rebels; Sen. Rand Paul, for example, is on the record opposing the use of U.S. military resources to fight ISIS in Iraq or Syria. Also, Clinton and many lawmakers acknowledge that arming the rebels was risky and might not have worked. The weapons could've fallen into the extremists' hands, and Syria might have remained a jihadist free-for-all. “Well, I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground,” Clinton said. But experts say Obama still sees Syria as one place where more American action will not make things better. Despite an uptick in American action across the border in Iraq—and despite an announcement of a half-billion dollars in military aid for the rebels—it’s unlikely Obama will drastically change his policy. “We may never know for sure if ISIS’s decisions were encouraged by Obama’s choices in Syria. What we know for sure is that ISIS metastasized in Syria and was not deterred because of anything Obama said or did so far,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Sometimes standing by and doing relatively nothing in the face of such a threat implicates you. The question now is, what do we do about it?” *Capital New York: “Schumer: Hillary would be ‘so happy’ with D.N.C. in Brooklyn” <http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2014/08/8550538/schumer-hillary-would-be-so-happy-dnc-brooklyn>* By Azi Paybarah August 11, 2014, 3:29 p.m. EDT Among the reasons New York's senior senator sees that Brooklyn should get the 2016 Democratic National Convention: The location would suit the party's most likely nominee. “Hillary Clinton, it’s been in the newspaper, wants it in Brooklyn, and she walked the streets of Brooklyn with me when she first campaigned, and I think she would be so so happy if we had the convention in Brooklyn,” said Senator Charles Schumer, standing outside the Barclays Center, where Democratic National Committee officials kicked off their 36-hour tour of the prospective host city. Clinton did not attend Monday event but prefers the prospective Brooklyn site to other possible host cities, including Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, according to unnamed sources cited by the Times. Asked how much his erstwhile junior colleague's preference should factor into the selection process, Schumer said, “You’ll have to ask the delegates. We’re just selling them on Brooklyn. They’ll have to weigh everything else.” A Clinton spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On Monday morning, D.N.C. officials traveled from midtown Manhattan to the Barclays Center in “under 14 minutes,” Peter Ragone, a top City Hall aide, told reporters. That's important, because Brooklyn doesn't have enough hotel rooms to accommodate all the delegates who would come to town for the convention. Ragone acknowledged that the short trip was made possible because committee members utilized "dedicated lanes" which, he said, are used “frequently in New York." When NBC's Melissa Russo noted that most people traveling the same route have much longer commutes, Ragone replied, "We have world leaders visiting all the time, including the president, very frequently." New York is bidding against Birmingham, Alabama, in addition to Phoenix and Philadelphia, which is considered early on to be the leading contender. The tour continues Tuesday with breakfast at Rockefeller Center, featuring an array of elected officials, “to demonstrate consensus among the Democratic Party to have this here,” Ragone said. Lunch will at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and “that will have all the cultural leaders of New York City there.” Though it would billed as a “five-borough” convention, the heart of it would be in Brooklyn. Borough President Eric Adams said Brooklyn is a micrcosm of the United States. City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, of Manhattan, said that "Brooklyn's story is America's story." For Mayor Bill de Blasio, who managed Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign in New York, hosting the 2016 convention helps underscore an economic message, Ragone said: “There is a concept here that goes beyond just the political convention, which is 54 or 55 million visitors here to New York City every year. ... But we want people to know it’s not just about Manhattan anymore." *CBS News: “As Hillary Clinton criticizes Obama, conservatives balk” <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/as-hillary-clinton-criticizes-obama-conservatives-balk/>* By Stephanie Condon August 12, 2014, 6:00 a.m. EDT Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent critique of the Obama administration's foreign policy, seemingly in preparation for a 2016 presidential run, has some pundits on the right crying foul. By criticizing President Obama's handling of foreign affairs, Clinton is attempting to distinguish Mr. Obama's view of America's role in the world from her own. Conservatives, however, are questioning how much Mr. Obama's former top diplomat can truly distance herself from the administration. Some liberals, meanwhile, have revived the argument that Clinton may be too hawkish -- a judgment some on the left leveled against her in the 2008 campaign. Clinton's harshest criticisms targeted Mr. Obama's response to the crisis in Syria, telling the The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg that the administration's actions there amounted to a "failure." "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. Mr. Obama himself has called that line of argument a "fantasy." "This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards," Mr. Obama said in an interview with the New York Times' Thomas Friedman that was published over the weekend. Marc Thiessen, a senior White House staffer during the George W. Bush administration who is currently a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called Mr. Obama's defense of his foreign policy "absurd." At the same time, he noted that Clinton can't easily distance herself from Mr. Obama's policies. "If she wants to achieve separation, she will have to answer some tough questions in the period ahead, such as: how hard did she really fight for arming and training the Free Syrian Army?" Thiessen wrote. "Did she threaten to resign? What specifically did she advocate doing to help the opposition? Did she advocate air strikes against ISIS? And - most importantly - did she oppose Obama's complete withdrawal from Iraq, which also 'left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled'?" Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist for the Washington Post, called Clinton's remarks "the worst sort of political opportunism for which she is infamous." "For a year and a half after leaving the administration, she has not spoken out against the president on Syria or much of anything else," Rubin wrote. "She did not have the nerve to resign out of principle on Syria, as did former ambassador Robert Ford. Only now, when the entire region has gone to seed she decides the Obama critics were right on some key aspects of foreign policy." The Republican opposition research firm America Rising similarly called Clinton's statements amount to " naked political opportunism." The group pointed to a 2012 interview with CBS News in which shot down the idea of more robustly arming the Syrian rebels. "What are we going to arm them with and against what?" Clinton said to CBS News' Wyatt Andrews. "We're not going to bring tanks over the borders of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan... If you're a military planner or if you're a secretary of state and you're trying to figure out do you have the elements of an opposition that is actually viable, that we don't see." Clinton's political interest in distancing herself from President Obama's foreign policy is evident: a CBS News poll released last week showed that while 52 percent of Americans have at least some confidence in Mr. Obama's ability to handle an international crisis, just 25 percent they have a lot of confidence -- down 14 points from last September. Criticism of Clinton's remarks was more muted on the left, though some anti-interventionist liberals took issue with her statements. Liberal Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon.com, wrote that as a 2008 Clinton supporter, she found the former secretary of state's comments "sobering." If Clinton were to run for president again, she "may think she can write off the anti-interventionist left - again." However, Walsh said, "So far, my approach to 2016 is to say that Clinton may not be perfect, but she's the not-perfect candidate we know, very well." *Politico: “Karl Rove: Clinton tries to be ‘Goldilocks’” <http://www.politico.com/story/2014/08/karl-rove-hillary-clinton-goldilocks-109908.html>* By Sarah Smith August 11, 2014, 12:04 p.m. EDT Karl Rove on Monday characterized Hillary Clinton’s split with the president on foreign affairs as the former secretary of state painting herself as “Goldilocks.” “She’s trying to position herself as sort of the Goldilocks of foreign policy,” the Republican strategist said on Fox News’ “Happening Now.” “She’s not gonna be as belligerent as Bush or as overly cautious as Obama.” Rove’s comments were a response to Clinton’s foreign policy interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, published Sunday, in which Clinton voiced her harshest criticism yet of her former boss. She painted herself as more hawkish than Obama, arguing that not arming Syrian rebels helped lead to the rise of ISIL and fiercely defending Israel. She also took a shot at Obama’s colloquial “don’t do stupid stuff” foreign policy principle telling Goldberg, “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Rove chalked up Clinton’s motives to pure politics. “I’m not certain that they’re going to view this in the White House as anything other than Hillary Clinton covering her political posterior in order to get nominated in 2016,” he said. *Calendar:* *Sec. Clinton's upcoming appearances as reported online. Not an official schedule.* · August 13 – Martha’s Vinyard, MA: Sec. Clinton signs books at Bunch of Grapes (HillaryClintonMemoir.com <http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/martha_s_vineyard_book_signing>) · August 13 – Martha’s Vinyard, MA: Sec. Clinton attends Ann Dibble Jordan’s 80th birthday party (Politico Playbook) · August 16 – East Hampton, New York: Sec. Clinton signs books at Bookhampton East Hampton (HillaryClintonMemoir.com <http://www.hillaryclintonmemoir.com/long_island_book_signing2>) · August 28 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes Nexenta’s OpenSDx Summit (BusinessWire <http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140702005709/en/Secretary-State-Hillary-Rodham-Clinton-Deliver-Keynote#.U7QoafldV8E> ) · September 4 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton speaks at the National Clean Energy Summit (Solar Novis Today <http://www.solarnovus.com/hillary-rodham-clinto-to-deliver-keynote-at-national-clean-energy-summit-7-0_N7646.html> ) · October 2 – Miami Beach, FL: Sec. Clinton keynotes the CREW Network Convention & Marketplace (CREW Network <http://events.crewnetwork.org/2014convention/>) · October 13 – Las Vegas, NV: Sec. Clinton keynotes the UNLV Foundation Annual Dinner (UNLV <http://www.unlv.edu/event/unlv-foundation-annual-dinner?delta=0>) · ~ October 13-16 – San Francisco, CA: Sec. Clinton keynotes salesforce.com Dreamforce conference (salesforce.com <http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF14/keynotes.jsp>) · December 4 – Boston, MA: Sec. Clinton speaks at the Massachusetts Conference for Women (MCFW <http://www.maconferenceforwomen.org/speakers/>)