Former President Bill Clinton on Sunday said he would have armed Syrian rebels two years ago, publicly taking his wife Hillary Clinton’s side in an internal debate with President Obama.
“I agree with her, and I would have taken the chance,” he said of arming Syrian rebels during an interview on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS.”
{mosads}“I also agree with her when she said we can’t know whether it would have worked or not,” he added.
“And that’s why you have to be careful when you make these commitments, because you can’t know.”
Hillary Clinton as Obama’s secretary of State argued for backing the Syrian rebels but was overruled by Obama.
Over the summer, Clinton suggested in an interview that the failure to arm the rebel groups had enabled the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
The White House has defended the decision not to initially arm and train the Syrian rebels, with administration officials arguing it was important to take time to vet which members of the opposition could receive U.S. arms.
“It is the view of this administration that, had arms been dumped into this already very violent, chaotic situation before a proper vetting of the opposition figures, we would actually probably be in a much worse, more violent situation than we find ourselves right now,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said earlier this month.
“So, because of the support that we have already provided to the Syrian opposition over the last year, that support has taken both military and nonmilitary forms, the capacity of the Syrian opposition is bigger, is broader, is stronger,” Earnest continued. “And there’s no question that those opposition fighters will be more effective when they have the backing of the United States military.”
But the former secretary of State argued otherwise in an interview with The Atlantic earlier this summer.
“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.
She subsequently called Obama to tell him the remark was not intended as an attack on him or his policies, according to a spokesman.
Obama is expected to see the former president later this week during an appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative on the sidelines of this week’s United Nations meeting in New York City.