It is rare for a succinct foreign policy platform paper to so fully reflect a candidate’s thinking process. The State Department email of Hillary Clinton, available on WikiLeaks, lays out the Democrat front-runner’s strategy as an architect of US intervention in Syria, shows the flawed reasoning that beget the scheme, and perhaps most importantly is totally blind to the huge problems that the war ultimately led to.
As with so many US wars in the Middle East, it all starts with Israel, and then-Secretary of State Clinton saw the US imposing regime change in Syria as primarily about benefiting Israel and spiting Iran, a position that closely mirrors several Israeli officials on the matter.
The Clinton ideal was that the US would impose regime change with arms, and without troops, and that Russia wouldn’t dare oppose America (noting Russia did nothing during Kosovo), that the new US-backed Syrian government would abandon ties with Iran, turn against Hezbollah, and potentially negotiate a peace settlement with Israel, while the rest of the Arab world cheers America “as fighting for their people.”
The number of flaws in the reasoning are huge, and in hindsight very few of Clinton’s predictions came to pass, from her declaration that the Iran nuclear talks wouldn’t lead to a deal, that Russia wouldn’t defend the Assad government from US-backed rebels, that US pledges of arms would lead to more defections from the Syrian military, etc.
Perhaps the most glaring mistakes, however, are the ones that go totally unwritten, with Clinton totally blind to the prospect of Islamist groups getting involved. Five years into the civil war, US-backed rebels are still comparatively trivial, despite huge weapons shipments, and ISIS and other Islamist groups control more than half of the country.
Clinton’s position seems to be wrong at nearly every turn, with her one correct analysis being the fairly trite observation that Israel wants to retain a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East, without offering any plausible reason for why the US should commit forces to supporting that.
While the paper serves as instructive on Clinton’s interventionist leanings, it may also be educational on the interventionist mentality in general, showing how quickly the notion of a “low cost” war becomes official policy, and that policymakers are ultimately blind not just to the reality on the ground, but to the bigger risks of their schemes.
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