Interview With Hillary Clinton

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and MARK LANDLERPublished: February 2, 2013

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Hillary Rodham Clinton was interviewed by Michael R. Gordon and Mark Landler on Thursday, her second-to-last day as secretary of state. Below are excerpts from the interview, which was conducted in her State Department office. Some of the questions have been edited for brevity.

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Q: President Clinton said that one of his greatest regrets was not doing more to stop genocide in Rwanda. We have a situation in Syria where more than 60,000 Syrians have been killed. [U.N. envoy Lakhdar] Brahimi has been making no headway diplomatically. The conflict is beginning to spread regionally with Iran’s intervention with its Quds Forces, its arms supplies, Hezbollah’s participation and now the Israeli strike on the convoy in Syria. Looking back, can you say that the United States has done everything it could have to stem the killing in Syria? And when you look back on this episode in the book you are going to write, do you think that you might regret that the United States wasn’t able to do more in your years here?

A: I think those are two separate questions, Michael. I think that certainly there will always be regrets when you are in positions like this one when it comes to the horrific slaughter of people trying to express themselves and defend themselves by a government that seems to have lost all sense of responsibility toward their own population. That is definitely a terrible set of facts on the ground that we try to deal with every single day.

However, when you look at it as we have, the United States has been very active. We have worked assiduously, first to create some kind of legitimate opposition presence that we would then serve as the vehicle by which we conducted negotiations and tired to use that to push [President Bashir al-]Assad over the edge of legitimacy.

That turned out to be much harder than it should have. Unlike Libya, where we had a Transitional National Council, despite all of their many difficulties there was an address. There were people I met with. I met them. I looked them in the eye. I was able to go back and say to the president, “These are people you can count on, you can bet on and we need to help them.”

For the first year, unfortunately, the people who were trying to represent the opposition outside Syria just couldn’t gain traction or credibility, and it made it difficult not only for the United States but many other countries to really do what we had hoped we could do.

But we never stopped trying, and we now have a new opposition coalition largely established because of our intensive efforts, my personal efforts, Robert Ford and our team. And yesterday for the very first time [Syria’s top opposition leader Moaz] al-Khatib came out and said, O.K., under certain conditions we can actually begin a political dialogue with this regime. That took a long time to get to, unfortunately nearly two years.

Secondly, we have been very active in training and equipping, with nonlethal tools, a lot of Syrian oppositionists who would come out of Syria and go back in. And we think it has made a difference in their ability to coalesce and organize.

Thirdly, we have been the architect and main mover of the very tough sanctions against Assad, which we know are causing problems because Iran has limited ability at this point to replace everything they don’t have, like diesel fuel. So we think that’s making a difference.

And finally on the humanitarian front, we are the most generous donor. It has been very difficult to get the aid and the money into exactly where it is needed. We have gotten a lot better about that. And we have worked also with our neighbors in the region.

Having said all that, Assad is still killing. The opposition is increasingly being represented by Al Qaeda extremist elements, including representatives of Al Qaeda in Iraq and Al Qaeda in the Maghreb and Al Qaeda, you know, messages coming, we believe, from the FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a semi-autonomous region in northwestern Pakistan], which is deeply distressing and unfortunately adds to the narrative with the Assad regime.

Now along those lines, I have spent enormous amounts of time and capital working with first Kofi Annan and now Brahimi. They are both very capable diplomats. They each have a lot of successes behind their names.

The role that Russia has played cannot be understated in terms of preventing the kind of action that should have been taken in the Security Council. So I worked with [the initial U.N. envoy on Syria] Kofi Annan. We convened the meeting in Geneva. I personally, literally, wrote and negotiated the accord for the action group. We had every reason when we left there to believe that the Russians were finally going to do something. They wanted airtight language against military intervention, but they were willing to throw in on the political transition. A new executive authority would have to be established. And there were willing to even tighten sanctions on individuals and institutions.