Here’s How Hillary Clinton Personally Created a Bloodbath In Libya, Arming ‘Rebels’ a
Here’s How Hillary Clinton Personally Created a Bloodbath In Libya, Arming ‘Rebels’ and Terrorists
AP Photo/Elise Amendola
BY:
JOSHUA YASMEH
FEBRUARY 29, 2016
According to a comprehensive New York Times investigation, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton personally facilitated the arming of anti-Qaddafi Libyan rebels in the wake of 2011 Libyan civil war. Those same “rebels” are now tearing Libya apart limb by limb as sectarian forces battle for territorial control and political supremacy. Many of the rebels the Clinton State Department armed joined Islamist causes and defected to terrorism.
The Times effectively blows the lid off “ a secret American program that supplied arms to rebel militias, an effort never before confirmed.” In an expose entitled “The Libya Gamble,” The Times’ Scott Shane and Jo Becker chronicle Hillary Clinton’s most pivotal power play as Secretary of State:
The New York Times’s examination of the intervention offers a detailed accounting of how Mrs. Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms. The Times interviewed more than 50 American, Libyan and European officials, including many of the principal actors. Virtually all agreed to comment on the record. They expressed regret, frustration and in some cases bewilderment about what went wrong and what might have been done differently.
The Obama administration’s response to the Arab Spring was abysmal. However, the administration’s crude actions in Libya were something else altogether, thanks to Secretary Clinton.
It all started in 2011 when disenchanted opposition forces began rallying against the long-time authoritarian control of dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Like in Egypt, thousands of people took the street demanding regime change. The stage was set for a coup. Qaddafi responded in kind and deployed the military to suppress insurrection. The result was a bloodbath.
To make matters worse, neighboring Arab states began meddling in the internal affairs of Libya. Mired in a fight for its political future, Libya was vulnerable. Neighboring states knew that and took full advantage. This was an opportunity to shape Libya’s future and puppeteer a political transition after years of totalitarian rule by strongman Qaddafi. What began as a domestic uprising soon became a full-scale regional war with a menagerie of Arab actors each claiming a stake in the conflict.
As surrounding states began to hedge their bets and fund opposition projects, the United States, under the direction of the Obama administration, sat back and watched the Arab states battle it out for geopolitical supremacy. What could go wrong? Well, a lot apparently.
According to The Times, “the United States’ strategy of letting other countries arm the opposition was backfiring, creating a regional power imbalance that could come back to haunt Libya if the rebels did win.” In effect, “the administration had effectively turned a blind eye as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates supplied the rebels with lethal assistance, according to [then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates] and others.”
At this point, Hillary Clinton took the reins. It was here that the secretary decided to ride in on her white horse and save the day. Damn the infinite permutation of potential consequences; this was Hillary’s Icarus moment. The Times reports (emphasis added):
But Mrs. Clinton had grown increasingly concerned that
Qatar, in particular, was sending arms only to certain rebel factions: militias from the city of Misurata and select Islamist brigades...
Mrs. Clinton understood the hazards, but also weighed the costs of not acting, aides said. They described her as comfortable with feeling her way through a problem without being certain of the outcome.
President Obama ultimately took her side, according to the administration officials who described the debate. After he signed a secret document called a presidential finding, approving a covert operation, a list of approved weaponry was drawn up. The shipments arranged by the United States and other Western countries generally arrived through the port of Benghazi and airports in eastern Libya, a Libyan rebel commander said.
“Humvees, counterbattery radar, TOW missiles was the highest end we talked about,” one State Department official recalled. “
We were definitely giving them lethal assistance. We’d crossed that line.”
But other senior officials were wary. NATO’s supreme allied commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis, had told Congress of “flickers” of Al Qaeda within the opposition. Mr. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, argued that the administration could not ensure that weapons intended for “the so-called good guys,” as one State Department official put it, did not fall into the hands of Islamist extremists.
Those “flickers” that NATO commander Stavridis reportedly warned about ultimately turned into uncontrollable wildfires. Shortly after, Col. Qaddafi’s fall from grace, Libya devolved into absolute anarchy. The same rebel forces that Hillary Clinton decided to arm broke ranks, splintering off into warring factions. Clinton and her team had no de-escalation strategy. No “day after” strategy. They hadn’t looked beyond the suspenseful day hordes of rebels surrounded Qaddafi and beat his languishing body to death in a remote part of the Libyan desert.
All it took for Secretary Clinton to arm the rebels were a series of meetings with the poorly managed Transitional National Council, or TNC, a now defunct political group. The Times notes:
Did the opposition’s
Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?...
Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”
Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.
The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.
Unexpectedly, Vox encapsulates the Obama-Clinton sponsored situation in 2016 Libya perfectly:Today, everybody agrees that Libya is a disaster. It has two competing, warring governments — neither of which actually runs the country. Militias roam freely. ISIS controls an entire city (Sirte), as well as a 175-mile strip across the eastern coastline.
The crisis in Libya is perhaps the most underreported Clinton disaster of this election cycle. According to the Centre for Research Globalization, “the situation in Libya is continuing to develop alarmingly. The current situation in the country is characterized by a complete lack of any signs of a state system. Libya is being devoured by civil war, disintegration, and the seizure of its territory by a huge variety of forces, most notably the Islamic State.”
For the Clinton camp, Benghazi is just the tip of the iceberg. President Obama himself considers the Libyan affair one of the biggest regrets of his presidency.
In a blistering indictment of Hillary’s tenure as the country’s chief diplomat, Shane and Becker of The Times write: “This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country.”
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