President Obama on Thursday admitted his administration’s failure in Libya, where Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton played an outsized role.
For years, Obama has lambasted President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and that administration’s lack of planning to stabilize the country afterward. But Obama acknowledged making similar mistakes in Libya.
“In Libya, we were right to launch an air campaign to prevent [Moammar] Gadhafi from massacring innocent civilians,” he said. “But we didn’t do enough to plan for the day after, when deep-rooted tribalism plunged Libya into disorder.”
The admission comes at an awkward time for the Clinton presidential campaign, just hours before the Democratic front-runner is set to deliver a major foreign policy address in San Diego, Calif., home to one of the biggest concentrations of military personnel in the country.
When she was secretary of state, Clinton pushed Obama to begin bombing in Libya, and that push is getting new scrutiny as she works to sew up the Democratic nomination this week.
Libya is now a failed state and one of the world’s worst terrorist havens. The decision to launch airstrikes in Libya without a plan to stabilize the government afterward is now viewed as one of Clinton’s greatest foreign policy weaknesses, along with her failure to prevent the deaths of Americans in Benghazi.
Obama’s Thursday speech also drew attention to his differences with Clinton on the civil war, the rise of the Islamic State and refugee crisis in Syria. He called the bloody civil war and the hundreds of thousands it killed “heartbreaking” and “gut-wrenching,” and defended his decision not to launch airstrikes against Syrian leader Bashar Assad after he used chemical weapons on his own people.
His decision to instead work with Russia to try to remove chemical weapons in the country had a much more positive and long-lasting impact, he argued.
“Suggestions for deeper U.S. military involvement in a conflict like the Syrian civil war have to be fully thought through, rigorously examined with an honest assessment of the risks and trade-offs,” he said. “How will it alter the conflict? What comes next?”
“When we ask those questions we prevent the kind of mission creep that history teaches us to avoid,” he continued.
One of the biggest differences between Clinton and Obama’s approach to Syria is her push to create a no-fly zone there, which would likely involve a direct injection of U.S. forces into Syria to preserve.
