"Parsing Hillary Clinton's Disingenuous Foreign Policy Record"

In their most recent debate in Wisconsin, ... Senator Sanders questioned Secretary Clinton's judgment in voting in support of a war with Iraq back in 2002, and furthered the issue of poor judgement by highlighting her support of policies promoting regime change in Libya and Syria since then, noting that such policies, while playing well to public sentiment, often have unintended consequences that prove to be far worse than the problem they ostensibly sought to resolve. ... A closer examination of the issues raised during the debate, in particular the decision to bomb Libya and remove the regime of President Muammar Gaddafi, the ongoing debacle unfolding inside Syria, and the recently concluded Iranian nuclear agreement, only underscore the reality that Senator Sanders, far from being weak on foreign policy matters, was right to question both the judgement of Hillary Clinton when it came to foreign policy and national security issues and her record as Secretary of State.

The decision by the Obama administration to intervene in Libya was both indefensible as policy and legally questionable in terms of international law. ... Even if one accepts the morally unsupportable notion that the ends justify the means, the rapid decline of Libya from a relatively stable nation state run by a repressive yet containable dictator (Gaddafi) to the chaotic morass of Islamist-infused anarchy that exists today makes even that contention moot -- there can be no doubt that Libya and the world was better off with Gaddafi in charge.

Senator Bernie Sanders is quite right to question the historic error of judgement on the part of both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama in using -- or abusing -- a United Nations mandate for the creation of a humanitarian "no fly" zone as cover for large-scale military intervention, void of express authority under international law, to achieve regime change in Libya.

Compounding this error is the decision that followed -- to capitalize upon the significant stocks of arms and munitions existing inside Libya in order to supply Islamist groups in Syria, intended to facilitate yet another round of regime change, this time targeting Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. ... Clinton ... representative in Libya, Ambassador Christopher Stevens (who tragically died in an attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012), was at the center of a massive arms smuggling operation that saw hundreds of millions of dollars worth of guns and ammunition shipped from Libya to Turkey and Qatar (both of these nations were, and are, key supporters and suppliers for the anti-Assad Islamist militants fighting in Syria). Stevens was personally involved in getting US Government approval of a $200 million contract to ship weapons and munitions from Libya to Qatar (which then flew the weapons into Turkey for further transshipment to Syria)... The notion that a US Ambassador would engage in such action without the express knowledge and permission of the Secretary of State is ludicrous. ... The larger issue of Hillary Clinton's addiction to "regime change" as a cornerstone of American foreign policy still looms. It manifests itself in the legally questionable covert policy to acquire weapons and ammunition in Libya and deliver them, through proxies, to Islamist militants in Syria. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has a clear record of advocating for "regime change" in Damascus, and in doing so has sold the American people a bill of goods regarding the true state of affairs in that nation. The role played by the United States in facilitating the rise of Muslim extremism inside Syria is a dark chapter in the history of American foreign policy, and while Hillary Clinton was not the originator of that policy, she inherited it and helped sustain and grow it, promoting the very violence that plagues that nation to this day.... When one incorporates into this already unseemly narrative the illicit gun-running scheme Hillary Clinton's State Department was facilitating out of Libya, the result was like pouring gasoline on a fire -- catastrophic. The fact that the former Secretary of State continues to support the creation of a no-fly zone over northern Syria that would serve to protect the last remaining strongholds of the Islamist militants her State Department helped create, train, and equip is indicative of the kind of alternate reality she and her supporters seem to live in -- one where the sins of Secretary Clinton's past (in Iraq, Libya and Syria) are forgotten amid a largely fabricated narrative that, while self-serving for Hillary Clinton, is a massive disservice to the American people and the millions of innocent civilians in the Middle East and elsewhere whose lives were turned upside down as a result. ... But the real issue is whether or not Americans should entrust someone who helped facilitate the rise of ISIS with a plan to counter that threat. Secretary Clinton played a vital role in the formulation and implementation of policies that, in the end, helped create, empower, and sustain ISIS. Bernie Sanders is right to point out the reality of unintended consequences, and to question whether or not Secretary Clinton is the right person for the job of fixing the very same problems she helped create. ... Hillary Clinton has likewise sought to spin the Iranian nuclear deal to her political advantage. According to her account, she initiated the engagement with Iran that, thanks to the pressure exerted by economic sanctions her State Department helped strengthen, drove Iran to the negotiating table, where the United States was able to "put a lid" on Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions. ... It wasn't economic sanctions that drove Iran to the negotiating table, but rather the reality of 20,000 spinning centrifuges inside Iran that drove the United States to the negotiating table. And far from capping a non-existent nuclear weapons program, the Obama administration had to surrender to the reality that Iran got what it always wanted -- the ability to exercise its rights under the nonproliferation treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear energy.

The false narrative of an Iran bowing under the pressure of American-led economic sanctions might play well among a largely ignorant American electorate, but the fact is any future president, whether it be Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders or one of the Republican contenders, will have to deal with the reality that Iran has emerged from the nuclear negotiations with everything it wanted thanks in large part to an internally consistent policy that proved unyielding to the pressures of economic sanctions. Hillary Clinton's approach to telling the truth about her record as Secretary of State is every bit as disingenuous as her claims that millions of dollars of campaign contributions do not influence her policy formulations. During their debate in Wisconsin, Senator Sanders chastised the presumptuous Hillary Clinton, declaring that "you're not in the White House yet." Nor should she ever be, given what we know about her real record on foreign policy.