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She did her job. I'm not saying exceptionally well, but competently. Legolas Send a noteboard - 25/10/2016 06:18:57 PM

On a number of points, we will never agree simply because we have different views of which outcomes are good and which are bad - for instance, I would include things like her dealings with Iran (though of course Kerry did most of the work on that afterwards), or her role in the American reaction to the Arab Spring as positives. On Russia and Ukraine, we again have quite different viewpoints - certainly yours is in many ways better informed, though sadly that's not sufficient to persuade me to just take your word for everything.

Among the less debatable achievements, her role in taking out bin Laden comes to mind.

View original postCan you provide any examples of anything? Hell, she and Obama didn't even get a status of forces agreement with Iraq. That, more than anything else, paved the way for the growth of ISIS (so yes, Trump is mostly right when he blames Obama and Hillary). The "Sunni Awakening" was working but instead of keeping troops in country and forcing the government to continue integration of the various power centers, we walked away and let a government that largely existed due to our support engage in active stupidity.

I agree that getting that agreement would've helped, but that doesn't mean that it was easy or that the failure was her fault. If the political will on the Iraqi side isn't there, it's not there.
View original postShe gave the Russians a little button that said "Overload" instead of "Reset" because apparently people at the State Department are complete morons and can't speak Russian, but then again that makes sense since while she was claiming to repair relations with Russia other parts of the State Department were actively working to undermine Russia's allies (like Ukraine pre-2014) and stoke its inherent paranoia about NATO's eastward expansion.

Yeah, that was embarrassing - but the attempt to reconcile was genuine all the same. And I don't exactly think it's America's fault that it failed in the end. The pro-European Ukrainians made a few atrocious decisions, such as their anti-Russian language bill almost immediately after gaining power, so I'm not saying everything is Putin's fault, but those are for their own account.
View original postShe totally failed to make any progress on North Korea. She stabbed Hosni Mubarak in the back and Qaddhafi in the face, the one who we spent billions each year propping up and the other whom we had just convinced to come in from isolation under Bush. She got our ambassador killed in Benghazi and lied about it.

I'd like to hear how you think anyone could've made progress on North Korea.
Mubarak is another one of the points where we simply won't agree so I won't waste my breath. Libya was and is FUBAR, and I will honestly admit that I've never bothered to investigate whether there is a serious case to be made against Clinton regarding the Benghazi incident - it's been partisan mudslinging from day one so there never seemed much of a point.
View original postYou call this a competent tenure as Secretary of State? Just because she didn't start a nuclear war with our greatest ally, the UK? The world is a fucking mess right now, and regardless of what you think about the Iraq invasion or the Bush doctrine, when George W. Bush left office it was a Hell of a lot more stable, even when factoring in the economic crisis.

The world is actually doing pretty well, thank you very much. Not that Clinton deserves a lot of credit for that - but neither should she be blamed for the things that went wrong just because she was in office at the time.

The economic crisis has merely hastened the inevitable reorientation towards a multipolar world, in which the old bi-polar Cold War tactics of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' don't apply anymore, or at least not in the same way. Obama and Clinton realized that in the end America's goals are better served by connecting with, say, the Egyptian people than with the dictator repressing them (or at least they did for a while - the way they're dealing with Sisi, one is inclined to think they went right back to the old ways). The Arab Spring was a long time coming, and even if it seems extinguished now, I dare say there will be further waves sooner or later.

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She did her job. I'm not saying exceptionally well, but competently. - 25/10/2016 06:18:57 PM 781 Views
Different perspective - 26/10/2016 07:01:20 AM 764 Views
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