A recent diary here gives a good summary of why Secretary "Strong and Wrong" Clinton has a bigger problem with "Benghazi" than the recent twitching and niggling over email servers and who messaged what—or didn't— during the embassy attacks. The real scandal is that, despite the horrible Bush example in Iraq, Hilary "WecameWesaswHedied" Clinton cheer-led the destruction of another relatively prosperous and stable African nation into a ISIS and jijadist playground, thereby showing that she learns nothing from history. Now we are looking at the possiblity of another ISIS seizure of another rich source of oil income, and some even think that, should Syria and Iraq get too hot for them, ISIS has a plan to relocate it's main Caliphate (if that's the correct word) to Libya.
But, pertinent as gjohnsit's diary is on the events in Libya proper, the Libyan fiasco stretches much farther south. Although you might not think so (I certainly didn't), ISIS was not the deadliest terror group. That dubious honor goes to Boko Haram, which notched up almost 600 more deaths than ISIS in 2014 (see report here). Yet before the fall of Gaddafi, Boko Haram was just one of many small groups of untrained, poorly armed malcontents infesting sub-Saharan Africa. The NATO destruction of the Libyan state caused a giant ripple of weapons and jihadis to roll across neighboring states, among them Mali. Mali is now a school for jihadis and Boko Haram used the opportunity to acquire arms and training for its fighters, thanks to "West Point Sahel" that our foreign policy geniuses were kind enough to set up for them.
But, you say, is it fair to lumber Hilary with this disaster when it's well known that the plan to overthrow Gaddafi was dreamed up by those Dynamic Dummies of the EU, Cameron and Sarkozy with lots of help from the jihadist paymasters in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates?
Yes.
In 1956 Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt, which had nationalized the Suez Canal. Regime change was in the air back then, but President Eisenhower forced the invaders to withdraw. Had he supported the invasion, the chaos now rampant in the Middle East might have stared 30 years earlier. Hilary likes to tout her diplomatic and foreign policy creds, but when she had a chance to really show some Eisenhower-style maturity, she threw in with the neocon regime change peckerflexers who still infested her State Department.