Hillary Clinton reiterated
her unreserved
support for both a “no-fly zone” and “safe zones” in Syria during
Sunday’s presidential debate — but in a partial transcript of private
remarks she made at a Goldman Sachs event in 2013, she acknowledged
some of the complications involved.
Her comments were included
in an 80-page report
prepared by the Clinton campaign listing the most politically damaging quotes
from Clinton’s paid speeches, which she has refused to make public. Among the
recipients of that report was Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, whose hacked emails were posted
by WikiLeaks on Friday.
In her remarks to Goldman
Sachs, Clinton pointed to the Syrian government’s air defense systems, and
noted that destroying them would take the lives of many Syrian civilians.
“They’re getting more
sophisticated thanks to Russian imports. To have a no-fly zone you have to take
out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas.
So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our
pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians,” she said. “So all of a
sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American
and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.”
She also addressed how much
harder it would be to intervene in Syria, compared to Libya.
“In Libya we didn’t have that
problem. It’s a huge place. The air defenses were not that sophisticated
and there wasn’t very—in fact, there were very few civilian casualties.
That wouldn’t be the case,” she noted. “And then you add on to it a lot of the
air defenses are not only in civilian population centers but near some of their
chemical stockpiles. You do not want a missile hitting a chemical
stockpile.”
While Clinton admitted these
complications in establishing a no-fly zone, she also urged other forms of
intervention. “And there is still an argument that goes on inside the
administration and inside our friends at NATO and the Europeans. How do
intervene—my view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to
intervene. We used to be much better at this than we are now,” she said.
She also explained how in her
view the civil war could have been avoided by offering concessions to the
Syrian people, saying that Syrian leader “[Bashar Al-] Assad very well could
have in my view bought them off with some cosmetic changes that would not have
resulted in what we have seen over the now two years and the hundred thousand
deaths and the destabilization that is going on” in the region.
At the Jewish United Fund
Advance & Major Gifts Dinner in October 2013, she blamed Saudi Arabia
for complicating efforts to arm ideologically moderate Syrian rebels — pointing
to indiscriminate Saudi arming of a wide variety of groups.
“Some of us thought, perhaps,
we could, with a more robust, covert action trying to vet, identify, train and
arm cadres of rebels that would at least have the firepower to be able to
protect themselves against both Assad and the Al-Qaeda-related jihadist groups
that have, unfortunately, been attracted to Syria,” she noted. “That’s been
complicated by the fact that the Saudis and others are shipping large amounts
of weapons—and pretty indiscriminately—not at all targeted toward the people
that we think would be the more moderate, least likely, to cause problems in
the future, but this is another one of those very tough analytical problems.”
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