Former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee took aim at Hillary Clinton for her “precious few” accomplishments during her tenure as secretary of state on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.
Chafee, who is a likely 2016 Democratic primary opponent for Clinton, told host Dana Bash the former senator’s vote for the Iraq War shows a “lack of judgement” on Clinton’s part, adding that she “didn’t do her homework.”
“Well, I enjoyed working with Senator Clinton. We overlapped for six years … but that vote for the Iraq War, that was a moment in time, Dana, where the Vietnam War had ended, the Berlin Wall had come down,” Chafee told the host.
“There was an age of lasting peace ahead of us if we made good decisions, particularly after Sept. 11 when people were angry and scared,” Chafee said. “That was a moment in time where the premise for going into Iraq was so false that there were weapons of mass destruction.”
“She didn’t do her homework, and we live with the ramifications,” Chafee continued. “You may say that’s 12 years ago, but we live with that today. And it’s a big motivator for why I’m running. If you show lack of judgment, lack of doing your homework then, what can we expect in the future?”
“You have called Hillary Clinton a ‘Democratic Bush enabler,’ and you said that when you endorsed her opponent in 2008, Barack Obama. What about now?” Bash asked the former governor. “Do you think her foreign policy chops are appropriate? Maybe her ideals and her goals are appropriate looking at the world now?”
“As I said, we’re going to have a lot of areas of agreement domestically, but I have some big areas of disagreement internationally, yes,” Chafee said. “I would say, even her tenure as secretary of state was kind of a muscular, top down, unilateral, too close to the neocons, too Bush-lite. You could say after her tenure as secretary of state, what kind of accomplishments did you have? There were precious few.”