There IS a track record in that regard. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touts her “experience” on National Defense. Perhaps she thought we would never check those Resume sources.
Recently Secretary Clinton insisted that going to War should always be a Last Resort, borrowing a line from her challenger’s foreign policy. Yet Secretary Clinton’s has a track record in that War-waging regard. It was her insistence that a regime-change war was necessary in Libya that led to war, despite the scant and questionable evidence to support that urgent Call to Action. In the end, Hillary got her SOS war ‘bona fides’. Check!
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Few even noticed the weakest moment in the Democratic frontrunner’s debate.
by Conor Friedersdorf, theatlantic.com — Oct 14, 2015
Using contested intelligence, a powerful adviser urges a president to wage a war of choice against a dictator; makes a bellicose joke when he is killed; declares the operation a success; fails to plan for a power vacuum; and watches Islamists gain power. That describes Dick Cheney and the Iraq War — and Hillary Clinton and the war in Libya.
At Tuesday’s primary debate, Clinton was criticized not just for the Iraq War vote that cost her the 2008 election, but also for the undeclared 2011 war that she urged in Libya. The Obama Administration waged that war of choice in violation of the War Powers Resolution and despite the official opposition of the U.S. Congress. [...]
“Remember what was going on,” she began, repeating a version of events that some intelligence officials and human rights groups doubt. “We had a murderous dictator, Gadhafi, who had American blood on his hands ... threatening to massacre large numbers of the Libyan people. We had our closest allies in Europe burning up the phone lines begging us to help them try to prevent what they saw as a mass genocide, in their words. And we had the Arabs standing by our side saying, ‘We want you to help us deal with Gadhafi.’”
[...]
She then put a positive gloss on the war’s outcome. “I'll say this for the Libyan people…” she said. “I think President Obama made the right decision at the time. And the Libyan people had a free election the first time since 1951. And you know what, they voted for moderates, they voted with the hope of democracy. Because of the Arab Spring, because of a lot of other things, there was turmoil to be followed.”
That is about as misleading as summarizing the Iraq War by saying that the Iraqis had a terrible leader; they had a free election after the war; and they voted for moderates. [...]
So much for “learning from the Mistake” of the Iraq War, eh?
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Benghazi Won't Stick to Hillary Clinton, But the Disastrous Libyan Intervention Should
by Joel Gillin, newrepublic.com — May 27, 2015
[...]
“We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton laughed after learning of dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s death. She's probably less triumphant today, given that Libya is now a failing state. [...]
Clinton and other Western officials sold NATO’s intervention in Libya as a humanitarian effort to stop the imminent slaughter of civilians in Benghazi. “Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled. … The cries would be, ‘Why did the United States not do anything?’” Clinton said in an interview in March of 2011. [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) also didn’t find strong evidence suggesting an impending slaughter by the time NATO intervened. “Our assessment was that up until that point, the casualty figures—around 350 protesters killed by indiscriminate fire of government security forces—didn’t rise to the level of indicating that a genocide or genocide-like mass atrocities were imminent,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa Division. Based on HRW’s figures, Alan Kuperman of the University of Texas pointed out that less than 3 percent of the 949 people wounded in the city of Misrata were women in the first two months of the conflict, suggesting — despite the many horrible crimes committed — security forces did not simply indiscriminately target civilians, another rebuke of the Rwanda comparison.
“What was decided was to declare Gaddafi guilty in advance of a massacre of defenceless civilians and instigate the process of destroying his regime and him (and his family) by way of punishment of a crime he was yet to commit, and actually unlikely to commit,” wrote Hugh Roberts, a scholar at Tufts University and head of the ICG North Africa Project at the time, “and to persist with this process despite his repeated offers to suspend military action.”
Wikipedia put the threats posed by Gaddafi, like so:
The history of Libya under Muammar Gaddafi spanned a period of over four decades from 1969 to 2011. Gaddafi became the de facto leader of the country on 1 September 1969 after leading a group of young Libyan military officers against King Idris I in a bloodless coup d'état. After the king had fled the country, the Libyan Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) headed by Gaddafi abolished the monarchy and the old constitution and proclaimed the new Libyan African Republic, with the motto "freedom, socialism, and unity".[3]
After coming to power, the RCC government initiated a process of directing funds toward providing education, health care and housing for all. Despite the reforms not being entirely effective, public education in the country became free and primary education compulsory for both sexes. Medical care became available to the public at no cost but providing housing for all was a task the RCC government was not able to complete.[4] Under Gaddafi, per capita income in the country rose to more than US $11,000, the fifth highest in Africa.[5] The increase in prosperity was accompanied by a controversial foreign policy, with increased political repression at home.[3][6]
Hardly sounds like a mad-depot about to impose “mass genocide” on the people, whom he’s actively housing, educating, and healing.
Those bellicose motives being whatever they may have been at that ‘foggy’ time … the international community is now left with a Libya, racked by violence and instability — an Outcome that no one in the US war-making administration at the time, apparently bothered to anticipate or foresee …
The Libyan crisis[1][2] refers to the ongoing conflict in Libya, beginning with the Arab Spring protests, which led to the First Libyan Civil War, foreign military intervention and the ousting and death of Muammar Gaddafi. The civil war's aftermath led to violence and instability across the country, which erupted into renewed civil war in 2014. The ongoing crisis in Libya has so far resulted in tens of thousands of casualties since the onset of violence in early 2011.
[...]
After the first Libyan civil war, violence involving various militias and the new state security forces occurred. The violence included an Islamist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and eventually escalated into the Second Libyan Civil War [of 2014].
Heckuva Result there, Madam Secretary. ISIS has another country to kick around, after yet another impulsive US Military Intervention has left it shattered and in shambles. Just par for the Mid-east course, I guess. Bomb and kick-ass first, {don’t bother to} ask introspective questions later.
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ISIS amassing 6,000 fighters on Europe’s border
By David Trayner, dailystar.co.uk/news — 11th February 2016
The terror group – also known as Daesh – has doubled its legions in Libya, north Africa, in just six months, the Pentagon has warned.
Oooops!
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Like I said at the top: So much for Hillary’s 'War as a Last Resort' commitment … if the past is any prologue.
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With “War experience” like that (and THIS), we should only expect MORE of such Nation-tinkering Interventionist ways. ALL implicitly by the way, in our Tax-paying, long-suffering names.