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The former secretary of state, and probable candidate for president, outlines her foreign-policy doctrine. She says this about President Obama's: "Great nations need organizing principles, and 'Don't do stupid stuff' is not an organizing principle."

President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groupslike the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq todayfrom seizing control of the rebellion. Inan interview in February, the president told me that when you have a professional army ... fighting against a farmer, a carpenter, an engineer who started out as protesters and suddenly now see themselves in the midst of a civil conflictthe notion that we could have, in a clean way that didnt commit U.S. military forces, changed the equation on the ground there was never true.

Well, his former secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, isnt buying it. In an interview with me earlier this week, she used her sharpest language yet to describe the "failure" that resulted from the decision to keep the U.S. on the sidelines during the first phase of the Syrian uprising.

The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assadthere were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middlethe failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled, Clinton said.

As she writes in her memoir of her State Department years,Hard Choices, she was an inside-the-administration advocate of doing more to help the Syrian rebellion. Now, her supporters argue, her position has been vindicated by recent events.

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Professional Clinton-watchers (and there are battalions of them) have told me that it is only a matter of time before she makes a more forceful attempt to highlight her differences with the (unpopular) president she ran against, and then went on to serve. On a number of occasions during my interview with her, I got the sense that this effort is already underway. (And for what it's worth, I also think she may have told me that shes running for presidentsee below for her not-entirely-ambiguous nod in that direction.)

Of course, Clinton had many kind words for the incredibly intelligent and thoughtful Obama, and she expressed sympathy and understanding for the devilishly complicated challenges he faces. But she also suggested that she finds his approach to foreign policy overly cautious, and she made the case that America needs a leader who believes that the country, despite its various missteps, is an indispensable force for good. At one point, I mentioned the slogan President Obama recently coined to describe his foreign-policy doctrine: Dont do stupid shit (an expression often rendered as Dont do stupid stuff in less-than-private encounters).

This is what Clinton said about Obamas slogan: Great nations need organizing principles, and Dont do stupid stuff is not an organizing principle.

She softened the blow by noting that Obama was trying to communicate to the American people that hes not going to do something crazy, but she repeatedly suggested that the U.S. sometimes appears to be withdrawing from the world stage.

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Hillary Clinton: 'Failure' to Help Syrian Rebels Led to ...