Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) this week blasted former Secretary of State— and potential 2016 presidential contender— Hillary Clinton and other “U.S. interventionists” he says are responsible for empowering the Islamic State terror group’s advances in the Middle East.
“As the murderous, terrorist Islamic State continues to threaten Iraq, the region and potentially the United States, it is vitally important that we examine how this problem arose,” Paul begins a Wall Street Journal op-ed published late Wednesday. “Any actions we take today must be informed by what we’ve already done in the past, and how effective our actions have been.
“Shooting first and asking questions later has never been a good foreign policy. The past year has been a perfect example,” the senator continues.
Shooting first, Paul contends, is precisely what Clinton and the Obama Administration did last year by advocating for regime change in Syria without “a reasonable degree of foresight.”
“The administration’s goal has been to degrade Assad’s power, forcing him to negotiate with the rebels,” Paul writes. “But degrading Assad’s military capacity also degrades his ability to fend off the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Assad’s government recently bombed the self-proclaimed capital of ISIS in Raqqa, Syria.
“To interventionists like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we would caution that arming the Islamic rebels in Syria created a haven for the Islamic State. We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn’t get her way and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS,” the lawmaker contends.
Clinton is of the opposite opinion, as we noted earlier this month:
Clinton blamed Obama for the ISIS advances in a recent interview with The Atlantic.
According to the former top diplomat, the Administration could have made it more difficult for ISIS to gain support throughout the Middle East by doing more to support rebels in Syria when that country was initially besieged by civil war.
“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.
This isn’t the first time that Paul, steadfast in his non-interventionist views despite pressure from his own party, has criticized the current Democratic administration’s foreign policy practices. And the lawmaker believes that the country is on his side.
Here’s what the senator had to say about Clinton on MSNBC over the weekend: “I think the American public is coming more and more to where I am… Hillary Clinton, who… fought her own war, Hillary’s War, you know… I think that’s what scares the Democrats the most, is that in a general election, were I to run, there’s gonna be a lot of independents and even some Democrats who say, ‘You know what, we are tired of war. We’re worried that Hillary Clinton will get us involved in another Middle Eastern war, because she’s so gung-ho.’
“If you wanna see a transformational election in our country, let the Democrats put forward a war hawk like Hillary Clinton, and you’ll see a transformation like you’ve never seen,” Paul opined.
