Former U.S. first lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has criticized the partisan divide in Washington and the Iraq government's role in its current crisis during a book promotion.
Clinton was promoting her new book, "Hard Choices," a policy-focused memoir of her tenure as secretary of state during the first term of the Obama Administration, in the Texas capital of Austin Friday, the Texas Tribune reported.
While still coy about whether she would seek the Democratic nomination for president in two years, Clinton excoriated the current partisan divide in U.S. politics.
"Our political system has to be fixed so we start working together again," she said to an appreciative audience.
During the 45-minute speech, she also touched briefly on the deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the ongoing Iraq crisis.
She called the Benghazi attack "a great personal loss" and lashed out at the Iraqi government's sectarian politics, which she said had fomented the long-standing hatred between sects.
"Iraq was given the chance with a lot of sacrifice to develop a modern state," she said. "It's a variety of bad decisions."
She didn't discuss Barack Obama's decision to send hundreds of "military advisers" back to Iraq more than two years after the president pulled U.S. troops out of the violence-plagued country.
Sunni insurgents have recently seized several strongholds in the country's north and are fighting a guerrilla war southward, causing alarm in the Baghdad-based central government. Obama announced Thursday he was sending up to 300 military advisers to support Iraqi security forces to counter the insurgency.