Spotlight: Hillary Clinton's foreign policy records scrutinized in debate

U.S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton faced scrutiny during Saturday's second Democratic primary debate of her past Senate vote for the Iraq war and her Libya policy.

In her opening statement, Clinton cited the Paris attacks, which killed 129 and injured more than 350, as the reason why the world should work together to eliminate "radical jihadist ideology" that motivates extremist groups such as the Islamic State (IS).

And then, the question everyone was expecting emerged.

"Won't the legacy of this administration, which you were a part of, be that it underestimated the threat from ISIS," the debate moderator John Dickson asked Clinton, referring to another acronym of the group.

Held just one day after Paris reeled from shooting carnage and explosions, the second primary debate soon proved uncomfortable for Democratic candidates, especially Clinton, as the trio scrambled to address questions about what critics called U.S. President Barack Obama's flawed assessment of the counter-IS campaign.

Just hours before the Paris attacks, Obama claimed in an interview aired Friday that the IS had been "contained."

It was not the first time Obama had downplayed the significance of threats posed by the IS. In a speech in June 2014, Obama said he could not have predicted the extent to which IS could be "effective in seizing cities in Iraq."

"There are many other reasons why it has in addition to what happened in the region," Clinton said on Saturday, "I don't think the United States has the bulk of the responsibility. I really put that on Assad (Syrian president) and on the Iraqis and on the region itself."

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, both of whom are Clinton's rivals within the Democratic Party, seized on the former Secretary of State's comments to quickly criticize her for her vote in support of the Iraq war when she served as the New York State senator.

"I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely and led to the rise of al-Qaeda and to (the emergence of) ISIS," said Sanders.

"I think that (the Iraq war) was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the history of the United States," Sanders added.

Unlike her 2008 campaign, during which Clinton defended her "Yes" vote for the Iraq war as a way to give then U.S. President George W. Bush authority to deal with Iraq, Clinton had admitted plainly in this election cycle that she made a mistake.

"I made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple. And I have written about it in my book, and I have talked about it in the past," said Clinton in May this year.

O'Malley argued that the chaos in the Middle East was not just limited to the invasion of Iraq, adding that "the cascading effects that followed" also played the roles.

"Our role in the world is not to roam the globe looking for new dictators to topple," said O'Malley, "We need to be much more far-thinking in this new 21st century... It is about understanding the secondary and third consequences that fall next."

O'Malley's comments followed an attack line, if only more implicitly, adopted mainly by the Republicans who accused Clinton and Obama of turning Libya into a lawless country after military actions in 2011.

In her congressional hearing on the 2012 Benghazi attack last month, Clinton was blasted by Republican lawmaker Peter Roskam, a member of the 12-member House Select Committee on Benghazi, for her strong advocacy for U.S. military involvement in Libya despite equally strong opposition within the Obama administration.

Calling Clinton the "chief architect" of the U.S. Libya policy, Roskam said Clinton insisted on the U.S. involvement in Libya despite grim warning and opposition from senior U.S. diplomats.

"In the case of our diplomatic history, when we've provided material or tactical military support to people seeking to drive their leaders from power, no matter how just their cause, it's tended to produce net negatives for our interests over the long term in those countries," Roskam said, quoting Stephen Mull, then executive secretary of the State Department.

"They (senior U.S. diplomats) were pushing back, but you overcame those objections," said Roskam, adding that Vice President Joe Biden, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the National Security Council also opposed military actions in Libya.

Calling Libya "a mess", O'Malley doubted Clinton's leadership capacity to anticipate threats and assess "just how difficult it is to build up stable democracies."

In her own defense, Clinton, again, said U.S. allies and partners in Europe and the Arab world "did ask for American help and we provided it," and put a positive gloss on the war's outcome.

"The Libyans turned out for one of the most successful, fairest elections that any Arab country has had," said Clinton, adding that an "arc of instability" from north Africa to Afghanistan spoiled the otherwise favorable results.

However, after the 2011 revolution which toppled Muammar el-Qaddafi, the situation in Libya immediately deteriorated as multiple militia and rebel groups who had previously fought against Qaddafi rapidly took control of the massive stockpile of weapons acquired by Qaddafi.

"If you look at history, you will find that regime change...these invasions, these topplings of governments, have unintended consequences," said Sanders. Endi