Clinton Ducks on Whether Her Iraq War Vote Should Still Matter to Voters

‘I was involved in the biggest counter-terrorism decision in the Obama Administration to determine whether or not to go after bin Laden’

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
TODD: "Do you think the Iraq vote should still matter to voters?"
CLINTON: "Well, I think voters are perfectly free to take into account anything they want to take, but I also hope they’ll take the rest of the record. I was involved in the biggest counter-terrorism decision in the Obama Administration to determine whether or not to go after bin Laden. I did put the sanctions on Iran to get them to the negotiating table. I think that this is a debate that the voters really have to pay attention to because it is choosing both a president and a commander in chief."
TODD: "Do you believe if it wasn’t for the Iraq war we wouldn’t have ISIS today?"
CLINTON: "Well, I think that’s a hard conclusion to draw because remember we had Al Qaeda before we had ISIS. Al Qaeda attacked us in new York. Al Qaeda attacked our embassies in Africa —"
TODD: "The instability in Iraq is what has created this and that if Saddam Hussein were still there we wouldn’t have ISIS."
CLINTON: "Well, I think that’s a lot of jumps in logic that to me doesn’t really add up. The Iraq war, there’s no doubt contributed to instability. I’m not going to in any way deny that. But you cannot draw a direct line. What you can do is to say that jihadist terrorism starting with Al Qaeda."
TODD: "Right."
CLINTON: "And moving onto its lat incarnations, most particularly ISIS, is in response to a number of forces and factors that are roiling up the Middle East. And certainly fighting for what Islam means and how it’s going to be presented and what people are going to mean when they talk about it. So, yeah, we’ve got a much bigger set of problems."
TODD: "All right."

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