A close look at Clinton’s record as Secretary of State reveals, not a progressive, but a neoconservative who shares with Kissinger, Cheney, and Rumsfeld an enthusiasm for destabilizing, and elective, wars of regime change. This is a pattern of intervention has left us with a swath of failing states from Libya to Iraq, to Syria, and to Afghanistan. Untold human suffering has ensued as the pipe-dreams of the neoconservative intervention hawks have consistently failed to materialize, although the profits of defense, security and energy contractors have certainly soared.
Hillary Clinton touts the intervention in Libya as a proud achievement during her reign as Secretary of State. This was an elective intervention that she championed, an act of war that had nothing to do with defending our country, and that was in fact illegal without congressional authorization.
What is the result of this strange achievement? Libya now has two rival governments and a range of armed factions all battling for control. Chaos reigns, and Islamic State militants are growing in strength, taking over cities and launching attacks on oilfields and major oil export terminals. Not only has Libya failed to become a democracy, it has become a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have drastically increased. During his last years in power, Qaddafi was helping the United States to combat terrorism, now Libya serves as a safe haven for terrorist groups such as al-Sham (ISIS), al Qaeda, and the Islamic State of Iraq.
Incredibly, after Libya was plunged into horrific chaos and became a safe haven for ISIS, Clinton, in Congressional testimony, still called our intervention there “smart power at its best.” and bristled at suggestions that it might be otherwise. Intervention hawks often claim that there was no way for anybody to predict the disastrous and destabilizing effects of their regime change policies, and seek to blame others for the chaotic consequences of their choice for elective war. But the chaos in Iraq was predicted and foreseen both by critics of the intervention, such as Senator Sanders, and by the top professional experts within the CIA and US military.
Hillary Clinton now claims that she made a mistake in supporting the Iraq war. However, her actions in Libya clearly show that she learned absolutely nothing from that mistake. Indeed, she was the driving force that persuaded a reluctant President Obama to intervene in Libya over the objections and misgivings of senior military advisors. Those against intervention included VP Joe Biden, national security adviser Tom Donilon, and then defense secretary Robert Gates. Gates recalls that:
“at one point I said, ‘Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?’”. Colonel Qaddafi, he said, “was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.”
The pervasive violence in Libya has caused roughly 400,000 civilians to flee their homes, according to UN estimates, and nearly 100,000 have left the country, making a desperate and dangerous sea voyage to Italy or Greece. This humanitarian nightmare, and not the tragic and regrettable death of 2 US diplomats and 2 CIA contractors, is the real “Benghazi scandal”.
Candidate Clinton continues to defend the optional intervention in Libya as an exercise in “smart power”, and says, without seeming irony, that “the Libyan people had a free election for the first time since 1951”.