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WATCH: Clinton
Defends Regime Change,
'Wouldn't It
Have Been Good to Assassinate Hitler?'
Hillary Clinton responded to Chris Mathews
challenging her position in favor of removing
foreign leaders by invoking Hitler.
March 17, 2016
MSNBC
transcript:
MATTHEWS: What
do you think, quickly, of the whole history of the
United States in your lifetime of knocking off
leaders, whether it's Mosaddegh in Iran or it was
Arbenz in Guatemala, or knocking off Allende in
Chile, or knocking off Patrice Lumumba in the Congo,
or knocking off Trujillo, or who else have I missed?
I mean, we've been doing this for a long time,
that's why I'm skeptical. But what is your view of
all those assassinations, all of the attempts to
change the history of other countries? Should we be
doing that kind of thing?
CLINTON: Well, I don't think...
MATTHEWS: Knocking off leaders.
CLINTON: In the vast...
MATTHEWS: Diem, we knocked him off.
CLINTON: In the vast majority of cases, the
answer is no. But, you know, there's always these
historical games you can play. If somebody could
have
assassinated Hitler before he took over Germany,
would that have been a good thing or not?
You cannot paint with a broad brush. Individual
situations, and most of the ones you named, are ones
that I think in retrospect did not have a very
defensible kind of calculation behind them.
But I think it's a mistake to say you can't ever
prevent war, you can't ever save people. You know,
if there had been a way to go after the leaders of
the massacres in Rwanda, to stop that before 800,000
people were killed, what would we have done?
We do, as you know very well, target terrorists. We
target them because we believe that they are
plotting and planning against us, our friends, and
our allies.
Now they may not be a head of state, but they are
very well the head of a terrorist group. So these
are tough, hard choices. That's why I wrote a whole
book called "Hard Choices" about some of this.
MATTHEWS: It looks like you're ready for the role of
commander-in-chief already, anyway. |
