After two weeks of Republican presidential candidates tying themselves in knots over the Iraq war, a new conventional wisdom has formed. Hillary Clinton has learned from her mistakes on Iraq and the Republicans haven’t.
“Unlike Jeb and Rubio, Hillary gives simple Iraq answer in 30 seconds,” reads one representative headline. The story says “she did give a more clear and concise answer on the legacy of the Iraq War and her involvement in the decision to invade, than any of her Republican opponents.”
The criticism of most GOP presidential contenders is fair. What people really want to know when they ask about the Iraq war in hindsight is not what the candidate would have done in 2003, but would he do something similar in 2017.
But is there really any evidence Clinton learned anything useful from the Iraq war, despite reiterating that her vote authorizing it was a mistake? The answer to this question is almost certainly no. Clinton not only voted for the war, but she’s already done it again.
Clinton was secretary of state when President Obama ordered “kinetic military action” in Libya. She was a prime mover inside in the administration backing preventive war for regime change. And unlike George W. Bush in Iraq, Obama and Clinton did not even seek a congressional vote.
“We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton chortled about ousted dictator Muammar Qaddafi. And today, like Iraq before the surge, Libya has descended into chaos and is teeming with Islamists. The civil war resumed in 2014 and shows no signs of abating.
What lessons from Iraq did Clinton apply to Libya? Her defenders point to the absence of American casualties. As with her husband’s 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo, the campaign was kept in the air. There were no boots on the ground.
It is unquestionably a good thing when U.S. casualties are avoided, but it’s hardly the only criterion for a successful military intervention. If it were, Iraq and even Vietnam would be judged greater successes than World War II, which no sane observer would argue.
If in Iraq we won the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein but lost the peace, in Libya we did not even try. We essentially helped topple the government and told the Libyan people to have a nice day. The lesson Clinton and Obama learned from Iraq seems entirely political: If we minimize the involvement of American troops, there will be no electoral consequences for the war no matter how big a disaster it is.
Make no mistake, Libya was a disaster. The country has been described as Woodstock for jihadists. It is having a generally destabilizing influence as weapons flow freely from Libya into armed conflicts in Mali, Syria and elsewhere. Libyan anarchy has helped spark the migrant crisis with which the European Union is now dealing.
Nation-building failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was nation-breaking supposed to work in Libya?
The main arguments for the Iraq war being essential to American security proved wrong, but no such national security interests were even asserted in Libya. Instead there have been claims that the war cost the U.S. valuable intelligence in fighting terrorism. At least it was probably more valuable than the Libya intelligence Clinton was getting from Sidney Blumenthal.
Libya relinquishing its weapons of mass destruction was one of the bright spots of the past decade of American foreign policy. Now how many tyrants running rogue states are likely to follow Qaddafi’s example?
To recap: there is a candidate in the 2016 race for the White House who launched a preventive war of choice against a regime without weapons of mass destruction, without congressional approval, which ended up triggering sectarian violence and unleashing jihadists like the Islamic State.
That candidate, who stands a decent chance of being the next president of the United States, isn’t running in the Republican primaries.
Are you ready for Hillary?
