Bill Clinton is correct when he says that you can’t let opinion polls be your guide to foreign policy. But when he compares the situation in Syria to the situation he faced in Kosovo, he’s making one of the stupidest statements that I have ever heard from him.
“You just think how lame you’d be… suppose I had let a million people, two million people be refugees out of Kosovo, a couple hundred thousand people die, and they say, ‘You could have stopped this by dropping a few bombs. Why didn’t you do it?’ And I say, ‘because the House of Representatives voted 75% against it?’” Clinton said. “You look like a total wuss, and you would be.”
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“If you refuse to act and you cause a calamity, the one thing you cannot say when all the eggs have been broken is, ‘Oh my god, two years ago there was a poll that said 80 percent of you were against it.’ You look like a total fool,” Clinton said.
First of all, the idea that the United States can “cause” a calamity in Syria is ridiculous. It is already a calamity, and it’s not because of our inaction. And the idea that all we need to do to fix the calamity and solve the refugee problem is to “drop a few bombs” is beyond idiotic.
For Clinton to appear with John McCain and make comments like this is a perfect vindication of my total opposition to his wife’s candidacy for president. We cannot afford more leadership from people who think about American power in this way. Obama has already overruled the advice of Hillary Clinton, the Joints Chiefs of Staff, then Director of the CIA David Petraeus, and then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and kept us out of the conflict in Syria. Now he has the former president intimating that he’s a wuss and a fool.
This is what we gained when we won the presidency for Obama. A cool head.
