“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 is what Clinton said about Obama’s slogan: “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”

It is open season on President Obama. He is a weak president. He is too cautious, they say. Even Hillary Clinton has jumped on the bandwagon. Hillary Clinton seems to be using the international unrest to criticize the President’s policies. She told the Atlantic Of course she is wrong. It is a continuum of doing stupid stuff and being presumptuous internationally that has cost us thousands of lives, cost hundreds of thousands of lives overseas, and depleted our treasury. Those who criticize President Obama for being overcautious should check history for America’s continuous blunders internationally that have kept us at war for decades with little marginal increase in security (Iraq twice, Iran, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, Dominican Republic, etc.)

America has a tendency to go against the will of the people to support "dictators" of our liking. Dissension and unrest is usually the outcome. “Don’t do stupid stuff” is a very good framework in which to put any foreign policy move we make. Hillary Clinton would do well to not run the risk of reminding Americans how wrong her vote to support the war in Iraq was. Many may see it not as a mistake she made based on Bush’s lies, but as a kinship in values with the neocons.

This weekend a lazy, seemingly gullible reporter asked President Obama if he regretted not leaving troops in Iraq. That is a question based on Republican talking points and not journalistic inquiry. The reporter should have known that the U.S.–Iraq Status of Forces Agreement was signed by President Bush which specifically said all combat troops would leave Iraq in December of 2011. President Obama attempted to negotiate keeping more soldiers in Iraq but could not come to an agreement with the Iraqi government who wanted the soldiers out.

Please read below the fold for more on this story.