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The
Unrepentant: Hillary, Libya, and History
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Hillary
Clinton played a decisive role in the decision to destroy Libya's
Qaddafi regime.
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Although Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the White House in part
because of lingering public resentment over the 2012 terror attack that
left four Americans dead in Benghazi, history will judge her even more
harshly for her decisive role in the preceding U.S.-led military
intervention in Libya.
In fact, then-Secretary of State Clinton was instrumental at three
critical junctures in convincing President Obama to green-light and
escalate the war to oust Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi.
First was her decisive role in the initial U.S. decision to lead a
NATO air campaign in Libya. Under intense pressure from European and Arab
governments to stop Qaddafi's forces from stamping out the incipient
rebellion, Obama administration officials were deeply divided. Those
opposing intervention included Vice President Joe Biden, National
Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
Those in favor included Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National
Security Council, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice.
Although Secretary Clinton ostensibly took no position at first, she
worked to pave the way for the intervention Power and Rice were urging by
brokering an Arab League resolution calling for an internationally
enforced no-fly zone. With that in hand on March 12, she flew to Paris to
meet with European officials and Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril,
after which she pressed Obama heavily to intervene. Gates later said
that Clinton's advocacy "put the president on the 51 side" of a
"51-49" decision to intervene.
There's little reason to believe
Libya would have faced a humanitarian catastrophe if Qaddafi had won.
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So what if the Obama administration had allowed regime forces to win?
Qaddafi's Libya was no democracy, but it was an occasional partner in the
war on terror and its human rights record was steadily improving. Indeed,
one of the reasons radical Islamists were so well poised to seize control
of the revolt is that Qaddafi (unlike other Arab dictators) had freed the
large majority of them from his prisons.
There's little reason to believe that Libya would have faced a
humanitarian catastrophe if Qaddafi's forces had pacified the revolt.
Their subsequent recapture of Zuwiyah and other towns in early March had
not produced mass civilian casualties. Sensationalist reports of mass
rapes, mercenaries, and protester-murdering helicopters that animated
calls for intervention in the early weeks of the war were later debunked.
Second, Clinton was influential in pressing for and publicly
legitimating the administration's shift from protecting civilians to
overthrowing Qaddafi. This was not "mission creep" — it was
decided before the first bomb fell.
Clinton pressed for the U.S. shift
from protecting civilians to overthrowing Qaddafi.
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While Obama was very reluctant to green-light this escalation, Clinton
was less concerned that "every step puts you on a slippery
slope," recalled
then-White House Mideast advisor Dennis B. Ross, paraphrasing her view as
"we can't fail in this."
Although U.S. officials maintained throughout that the NATO
intervention was strictly intended to protect civilians, Gates later acknowledged
this was "fiction." NATO interpreted
UNSCR 1973 to be an open-ended mandate to pummel Qaddafi's forces until
"the regime has verifiably withdrawn to bases all military
forces." In other words, until the regime accepts military defeat
and loss of power.
Though unwilling to give up power completely and unconditionally,
Qaddafi continually appealed for cease-fires and dialogue throughout the
war, via such intermediaries as retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Charles
R. Kubic, Turkey, Greece, Malta, the African Union, and UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon. "Come France, Italy, UK, America.
Come, we will negotiate with you. Why are you attacking us?" the
Libyan leader pleaded
in an April 30 televised address.
There's no reason to believe that Qaddafi and secular rebel groups
couldn't have agreed on a "pacted transition" to democracy that
allowed regime elites some temporary role in government, as Islamist
forces had not reached anywhere near their peak strength in the late
spring of 2011. At least three senior State Department officials expressed
misgivings about overthrowing Qaddafi — Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie
Slaughter, Assistant Secretary of State Philip H. Gordon, and Jeremy
Shapiro.
But the Libyan leader's pleas were ignored. When the last NATO air
strike of the war hit the dictator's personal convoy as he attempted to
flee his encircled hometown for exile abroad in October, leading to his
capture and ad hoc execution, Clinton exclaimed
giddily, "We came, we saw, he died."
A
fleet of ISIS vehicles parades through Benghazi in February 2015.
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Jibril and other Libyan secularists might still have gained military
superiority on the ground were it not for a third fateful American
mistake.
With Qaddafi's forces holding their ground despite weeks of NATO
airstrikes, Washington approved
and facilitated a massive Qatari arms lift that largely bypassed the
secular National Transitional Council (NTC) in favor of radical
Islamists.
Those involved in this fiasco haven't revealed much about it in
contemporaneous emails or subsequent congressional testimony, but it's
clear that Clinton was an early advocate
of covertly funneling arms into Libya and personally oversaw official
communications with the Qataris throughout.
Clinton still denies
responsibility for the war to oust Qaddafi.
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Owing to the combined impact of Secretary Clinton's three errors in
judgment, Libya today is a central logistical and operational hub for
ISIS and other violent Islamist groups across North Africa and the Middle
East.
Nevertheless, she continues to deny responsibility for the war to oust
Qaddafi. "The decision was the president's. Did I do the due
diligence? Did I talk to everybody I could talk to? Did I visit every
capitol and then report back to the president?" she said
on the campaign trail last April. "Yes, I did. That's what a
secretary of state does. But at the end of the day, those are the
decisions that are made by the president."
History doesn't cut the unrepentant any breaks.
Gary C. Gambill is a research
fellow at the Middle East Forum. Teri Blumenfeld is a researcher at the
Investigative Project on Terrorism and the Middle East Forum.
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