Hillary Clinton’s policy director seemed to admit Tuesday that Clinton does not yet have a strategy to defeat the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL), even though the threat posed by the terrorist group has been widely acknowledged for more than a year.
Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s top policy director, took a question from the press about Clinton’s approach to IS in advance of a major foreign policy speech by GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush.
Clinton also doesn't have a strategy yet for dealing with ISIL https://t.co/1As3HZYpZt
— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) August 11, 2015
Sullivan did not provide any details about Clinton’s strategy, although he did say that "American boots on the ground cannot fix Iraq."
President Barack Obama was heavily criticized for his admission, first uttered in mid-2014 and again one year later, that his administration did not have a complete strategy to deal with the terrorist group as it established a quasi-state in Iraq and Syria.
Clinton served as Obama’s Secretary of State from 2009 to 2012, when the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq created a vacuum of power that was exploited by IS.
It has been one year and one month since IS won its first major victory by seizing the city of Mosul from the Iraqi government.