Days before President Obama said sending troops into Syria to fight the Islamic State would be a “mistake,” Hillary Clinton once again cast her past support of military intervention in Libya as a humanitarian effort.
Her comments came during the Democratic debate Saturday evening, when she faced additional questions about her push for a policy that ultimately left a Middle Eastern country in chaos.
Pulled left by a progressive challenge from Sen. Bernie Sanders and confined by President Obama’s refusal to ramp up military engagement, which he reiterated Monday at the G20 Summit in Turkey, Clinton argued during the debate that military force should be a “last resort” in Syria, despite her stated desire to depose Syrian President Bashar Assad.
That precarious positioning on Syria mirrors the stances she has been forced to take on Iraq and Libya, given that she presided over the widely-criticized withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011 and previously proclaimed “ownership” of the U.S. policy in Libya that left a vacuum in the wake of Moammar Gadhafi.
The former secretary of state attributed her enthusiasm for the war to the fact that Gadhafi’s regime was attacking citizens, including Americans.
But she downplayed the instability that quickly followed Gadhafi’s ouster, some of which led to the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi.
Clinton also glossed over her past friendliness to the Gadhafi regime. In 2009, she appeared alongside Mutassim Gadhafi, then Libya’s national security adviser and son of its dictator, in Washington and pledged her support of his government.
After Clinton blasted the lack of strategy that followed the Iraq invasion, which she voted for as a senator in 2002, moderator John Dickerson pressed her on whether the same could be said of her push to intervene in Libya without a plan for the aftermath.
“Well, we did have a plan. And I think it’s fair to say that of all of the Arab leaders, Gadhafi probably had more blood on his hands of Americans than anybody else,” Clinton said Saturday evening during the debate.
She touted “one of the most successful Arab elections that any Arab country has had” as evidence that the military intervention in Libya was not a failure, a move she has employed when questioned about the issue in the past.
However, those elections took place just two months before the U.S. compound in Benghazi was overrun and four Americans were killed. She neglected to mention the violence that both preceded and followed the July 2012 elections, including uprisings on the day Libyans cast their votes.
The government Libyans created in those elections has since collapsed. Islamic State militants are gaining strength in Libya, where weapons left over from the civil war Clinton supported are reportedly plentiful.
Two years before Clinton began her push to depose Gadhafi, she was shaking hands with his son in Washington.
“I am very pleased to welcome Minister Gadhafi here to the State Department. We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya,” Clinton said as she stood beside Mutassim Gadhafi in April 2009. “We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our cooperation, and I’m very much looking forward to building on this relationship.”
During the first Democratic debate in October, Clinton urged voters to “remember what was going on” at the time she pushed the White House to authorize airstrikes in Libya.
“We had a murderous dictator, Gadhafi, who had American blood on his hands, as I’m sure you remember, threatening to massacre large numbers of the Libyan people,” she said.
Although she was a fierce proponent of military intervention in Libya while she was secretary of state, she has recently attempted to characterize that position as one that came only after the international community and the White House advocated for military engagement.
“We had our closest allies in Europe blowing up the phone lines begging us to help them try to prevent what they saw as a mass genocide, in their words,” she said in October. “And we had the Arabs standing by our side saying, ‘we want you to help us deal with Gadhafi.'”
Clinton’s support of the Gadhafi regime began to soften as the future of Libya’s oil industry became uncertain.
In early 2009, Gadhafi reportedly threatened to nationalize oil firms, a move that would have rattled the corporations that did business there. Many of those firms had ties to Clinton.
For example, Chevron has long been deeply connected to the Clintons and has donated heavily to her family’s foundation. Chevron was also a major player in the Libyan oil industry, leading the U.S.-Libya Business Association alongside ConocoPhillips, another major Clinton Foundation supporter.
The CEO of ConocoPhillips reportedly hung a picture of himself and Gadhafi in his office.
Clinton tapped David Goldwyn, former director of the U.S.-Libya Business Association, to direct energy affairs at her State Department. According to a report last year by Mother Jones, Clinton’s new energy affairs envoy had “lobbied Congress for pro-Libyan policies,” which included an effort to shield the Libyan government from lawsuits filed by the families of Lockerbie bombing victims. Gadhafi allegedly played a direct role in the 1988 bombing of a plane over Scotland.
Emails released by the State Department indicate Clinton was indeed concerned about Libyan oil during the heat of the conflict.
She apparently deleted some of the emails, which were provided to the House Select Committee on Benghazi by her confidante Sidney Blumenthal but withheld from the State Department.
One deleted email suggests Libyan leaders were “well aware” of which “major oil companies and international banks” supported them during the revolution, information they would “factor into decisions” about about who would be granted access to the country’s oil reserves when the dust began to settle.
Other emails that Clinton did not delete indicate her closest advisers, such as Tony Blair, were worried about the conflict’s effect on oil prospects.
“Please work on the no-fly zone, or the other options I mentioned,” Blair wrote to Clinton in February 2011. “Oil prices are rising, markets are down. We have to be decisive.”
Clinton soon secured permission to establish the no-fly zone.
The resulting instability in Libya, which continues to provide a safe haven for the Islamic State to this day, has created tension for Clinton as she attempts to join fellow Democrats in blaming President George W. Bush and his Iraq intervention for the rise of the terrorist group.
“I would argue that the disastrous invasion of Iraq, something that I strongly opposed, has unraveled the region completely. And led to the rise of al Qaeda and to ISIS,” Sanders said during the debate Saturday.
Though he alluded to the problems tied to U.S.-sponsored regime change in the Middle East that preceded American withdrawal, Sanders declined to attack his Democratic opponent specifically for Libya.
“Of course 9/11 happened, which happened before there was an invasion of Iraq,” Clinton said in response. “I have said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake.”
But Clinton has said removing Assad should be a top priority of the United States, a position that puts her at odds with members of her own party who point to the current situation in Iraq and Libya as examples of the consequences of regime change.
Clinton once celebrated Assad’s regime, suggesting in March 2011 that the Syrian dictator is a “reformer.”
The nuances of Clinton’s foreign policy could come under harsher scrutiny after a series of Islamic State terror attacks in Paris Friday highlighted weaknesses in the West’s overall strategy in Syria.
According to multiple media reports, the attackers had entered France by posing as Syrian refugees.
Her flip-flop on Iraq, on the Gadhafi regime in Libya and on the extent of U.S. involvement in Syria could pose fresh problems for Clinton as Islamic State militants threaten attacks on America.
Republican presidential candidates have lined up to voice their opposition to Obama’s plan to bring thousands of Syrian refugees into the United States given the ease with which the Paris terrorists were able to pass as such refugees.
Clinton, on the other hand, called on the president to bring in even more Syrian refugees during the debate Saturday.
“I also said that we should take increased numbers of refugees,” she said. “The administration originally said ten [thousand]. I said we should go to 65 [thousand], but only if we have as carefully screening and vetting process as we can imagine, whatever resources it takes.”
