Africa Center Nonresident Senior Fellow Ricardo Larémont writes for US News & World Report’s “Debate Club” on the question of whether President Obama should have armed Syrian rebels sooner:
During the past 72 hours, a rhetorical storm has arisen between President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarding whether the president’s failure to support secular Syrian rebels’ efforts to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad adequately contributed to the success of the Islamic State on both the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.
Clinton, in an interview in the Atlantic, said that the president’s “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.” Obama, in response to the barrage of criticism that has emerged not only from Clinton but also other critics, has said that the idea that the United States should have assisted a disunited coalition of Syrian rebels would have amounted to sheer “fantasy.”