As Obama's Middle East policies continue to unravel, can Hillary Clinton escape the taint of disaster?

Over the weekend, Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt was unsparing in his criticism ofPresident Obama’s Syria policy. According to Hiatt, Obama has “presided over a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions” and, worse, has done so while telling Americans that it’s no big deal.
Hiatt is certainly correct about the humanitarian and cultural disaster, and also about Obama’s do-nothing approach. He notes, “On those rare occasions when political pressure or the horrors of Syrian suffering threatened to overwhelm any excuse for inaction, he promised action, in statements or White House leaks: training for the opposition, a safe zone on the Turkish border. Once public attention moved on, the plans were abandoned or scaled back to meaningless proportions (training 50 soldiers per year, no action on the Turkish border).”
Obama initially called for the removal of Syrian President Bashar Assad, only to back down in the face of opposition from Vladimir Putin. Since then, the United States has postured a bit, but done nothing of consequence. The signal to our enemies: It’s safe to ignore us. The signal to our friends: It’s foolish to rely on us.

Now, as the war in Syria has expanded — with the U.S. arming and supporting various groups that have shown a disturbing tendency to take our guns and then switch sides — refugees are flooding Europe. It is, as Ron Radosh correctly states, Barack Obama’s refugee problem.
This would be bad enough if Syria were the Obama administration’s only foreign policy misstep, but instead it is merely representative of a larger problem. President Obamabragged about Yemen as a showpiece of his administration’s anti-terror program’s success; a few months later, Yemen was taken over by terrorists and now an ugly civil war, featuring Saudi troops, rages there. The administration’s responses, as even the Obama-friendly Vox.com notes, have been ”cringe-worthy.”
Then there’s Libya. Under President George W. Bush, the United States reached anagreement with Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi under which Gadhafi would give up his weapons of mass destruction in exchange for the United States no longer trying to depose him. But just years later, the Obama administration, spearheaded by then-secretary of State Hillary Clinton, went ahead and toppled him anyway. Now Libya, too, is wracked by bloody civil war, and sending waves of refugees pouring into Europe. At the time, Hillary thought the war on Gadhafi would be a strong selling point in her 2016 presidential campaign ("We came, we saw, he died," she joked after Gadhafi fell, and advisor Sidney Blumenthal told her to tout her "successful strategy” to the press); now she’s not talking about it much.
But Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb has gone after her: "We blew the lid off of a series of tribal engagements. You can't get to the Tripoli Airport right now, much less Benghazi." And others are likely to ask her whether toppling Gadhafi was justified, and, if not, why we should trust her judgment in the future. Others are likely to note that she also supported the invasion of Iraq.


And Iraq is an issue, too. As late as 2010, Joe Biden was bragging about how well things were going in Iraq, and as late as 2014, Obama was mocking ISIS as a terrorist JV team. In 2011, in a move calculated to solidify support among Democrats before the 2012 elections, Obama removed U.S. troops from Iraq. Not only did we lose the stabilizing influence of a U.S. troop presence, but we also lost the painstakingly built upintelligence networks that American forces had assembled over a decade, allowing the Administration to be blindsided by the rapid growth of ISIS.
As journalist Bob Woodward noted: “Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case.” And we, and Iraqis, are paying the price.
In the Middle East, everything Obama has touched has failed disastrously — and he’s had help in this failure from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. With 2016 coming, will that provide an opening for Democratic candidates — like Webb, perhaps, or Bernie Sanders — who are untouched by these failures? Maybe so. But a bigger question is what burdens will America, and the world, have to bear because of this awful record. I fear that they will be very heavy indeed.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.