The US military launched dozens of missiles at an airfield in western Syria today (April 6), days after the Syrian government allegedly used chemical weapons against civilians.
Hours before that, Hillary Clinton gave an interview to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof at an event in New York where she expressed support for a US strike on Syrian airfields. It was her first public interview since she lost the presidential election.
Clinton said to Kristof:
“Assad had an airforce, and that airforce is the cause of most of the civilian deaths, as we have seen over the years, and as we saw again in the last few days. I really believe that we should have, and still should, take out his airfields, and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.
There will be people who say, it’s not our fight, we don’t care, what difference does it make, we’re not involved. First of all, we are in an interconnected, interdependent world, unlike any we’ve been in history before, because of mobility, because of communication, and so what happens in other places can very much have an impact on you. We’ve got to once again start recognizing norms of behavior in our own country and globally are just as important to keeping peace and preventing atrocities as any law that is written down. People have to know that they will be held accountable as war criminals as committing crimes against humanity if they engage in these kinds of oppressive, violent acts.”
As secretary of state under president Barack Obama, Clinton had advocated a more muscular approach (paywall) to Syria and other conflicts in the Middle East, including establishing a no-fly zone in Syria.