Read Goldberg's interview with Hillary Clinton before you read Goldberg's account of that interview

I've seen more than one tweet this morning to the effect that Hillary Clinton "threw Obama under an ISIS-driven Humvee" in a long, probing, interview with Jeffrey Goldberg.  I think that's a wrong impression created by Goldberg's introductory overview, which overstates her actual and implied criticisms of Obama.

It's no secret that Clinton advocated for early U.S. support of allegedly moderate factions in the Syrian opposition. And it's necessary and prudent for Hillary to distance herself from Obama, or position herself to do so, in that a) she genuinely is more interventionist, and b) the world could blow up on Obama and doom her chances if she's seen as a continuation. But it's also in Hillary's DNA to hedge, both from a desire to cover both sides and an ability to see complexity (except with regard to Israel, to which she pandered without inhibition). And in at least three instances, Goldberg emphasized just one side of her equation.

First, with regard to the Syrian intervention. Here's Goldberg:

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 Assad—there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle—the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

And here's Hillary, in the interview: