Monday on MSNBC’s “MTP Daily” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who lost the argument within the Obama administration to arm Syrian rebels in February of 2013 when she was Secretary of State said if the president had listened instead of waiting until September of 2014, “maybe we could have made a difference.”
Host Chuck Todd asked, “You were an advocate of training some rebels to fight Assad and ISIS on the ground. We got a report this week that was startling. There are four or five, not 400, or 500, four or five rebels that we have trained with American military help that are still there fighting the fight. This is a failure of policy, isn’t it?”
Hillary answered, “Well, it is. When I recommended it, it was several years ago, and I can’t sit here and tell you that if we had done what I and General Petraeus and Secretary Panetta and others recommended, we would have made more progress on the ground. I obviously thought so at the time because as we look back, the people who were fighting Assad were, you know, they were business people, they were students, they were professionals, who had risen up against his tyrannical rule, that had really kept so much of Syria under his thumb. And before him, his father’s thumb. If we had been able to move in to help organize and support those people on the ground, maybe we could have made a difference. Well, we got to deal with where we are right now. It’s obviously now, a different set of circumstances and what the Pentagon has been doing hasn’t worked.”
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