Hillary Clinton's Boko Haram Problem

Hillary Clinton has not been having a very good week.

First, the House of Representatives convened a select committee to investigate Benghazi. The committee will attempt to show the world that Hillary Clinton is a manifest incompetent. After all, she was in charge. She left the Ambassador defenseless. And she apparently refused to order a rescue mission. Beyond that, she lied about the cause of the attack.

Second, Monica Lewinsky reappeared in Vanity Fair to remind the world of Hillary’s status as the world’s leading cuckquean—role that does not inspire respect or confidence. Moreover, Lewinsky accuses movement feminists—Hillary’s core supporters—of hypocrisy for rushing out to defend Bill Clinton against the women who accused him of abuse, harassment and even rape. The fact that Lewinsky's life has been largely ruined by the Clintons does not make HRC look very good or decent.

And third, in the aftermath of the abduction of hundreds of girls by Nigerian terrorists we learn that when Hillary Clinton ran the State Department she fought ferociously to ensure that Boko Haram-- the Islamist terrorist group responsible for the abductions and for a wave of violence throughout the country—not be labelled a terrorist organization.

Clinton Tweeted her outrage over the abduction, but these three events drowned out her “war on women” theme.

It’s almost as though America is starting to see through the mirage that is Hillary Clinton.

One can hope.

The most recent revelation about the Clinton State Department comes to us from Josh Rogin of The Daily Beast. Hardly a right wing shill, Rogin recounts in painful detail that many people implored Hillary Clinton to declare Boko Haram a terrorist organization. And he explains how and why she refused to do so.

In Rogin’s words:

What Clinton didn’t mention was that her own State Department refused to place Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2011, after the group bombed the U.N. headquarters in Abuja. The refusal came despite the urging of the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and over a dozen senators and congressmen.

In May 2012, then-Justice Department official Lisa Monaco (now at the White House) wrote to the State Department to urge Clinton to designate Boko Haram as a terrorist organization. The following month, Gen. Carter Ham, the chief of U.S. Africa Command, said that Boko Haram “are likely sharing funds, training, and explosive materials” with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. And yet, Hillary Clinton’s State Department still declined to place Boko Haram on its official terrorist roster….

“For years, Boko Haram has terrorized Nigeria and Western interests in the region with few consequences,” Sen. James Risch told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “The U.S. government should have moved more quickly to list them as a terrorist organization and brought U.S. resources to track and disrupt their activities. The failure to act swiftly has had consequences.”

Andrew McCarthy explains why Clinton’s failure was of a piece with her and the Obama administration’s policy toward Islamist terrorism:

Boko Haram is an Islamic-supremacist organization. Mrs. Clinton, like the Obama administration more broadly, believes that appeasing Islamists—avoiding actions that might give them offense, slamming Americans who provoke them—promotes peace and stability. (See Egypt for a good example of how well this approach is working.) Furthermore, if you are claiming to have “decimated” al-Qaeda, as the Obama administration was claiming to have done in the run-up to the 2012 election, the last thing you want to do is add jihadists to the terror list (or beef up security at diplomatic posts in jihadist hot spots, or acknowledge that jihadist rioting in Cairo or jihadist attacks in Benghazi are something other than “protests” inspired by “an Internet video” . . .)

We do not know what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had officially labelled Boko Haram a terrorist group. Yet, her failure to do so, taken in the context of her other failures at foreign policy diminish her as the presumptive Democratic candidate.

Perhaps Republicans should not be so afraid of a Hillary candidacy. For now they believe that she can be easily elected, but it is just as possible that she will implode on contact.

Hey, you never know.