In the Democratic presidential debate earlier this month, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the U.S. intervention in Libya “smart power at its best.” She boasted that “the Libyan people had a free election for the first time since 1951.”
These triumphal statements bear very little resemblance to the reality in Libya today. For one thing, that government the Libyans elected is not actually in charge. Libya is a failed state with two rival governments, and most of the country is under the control of neither. Fighting rages amongst various factions, including all of the well-known terrorist groups. Nearly 10 percent of Libya’s population has been forced to flee their homes.
This Tuesday marked the fourth anniversary of the killing of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi in his hometown, the coastal city of Sirte. Today, the Islamic State controls Sirte. It also recently seized the eastern Libyan city of Derna and reportedly has a presence in Benghazi as well.
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The truth is, Libya’s civil war never ended, even though Clinton and the Obama administration lost interest in Libya the moment the death of four Americans in a terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi made it look like anything other than a shining triumph.
On Thursday, Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi seemed to take both Clinton and her Democratic defenders by surprise when they led off with questions about this. But they were right to raise these questions, and she should have been better prepared to answer them.
From within the Obama administration, Clinton had been a strong supporter of the unauthorized military intervention in Libya. In 2011, it was even dubbed “Hillary’s War,” perhaps to her delight at the time. When Gadhafi was on the run and Libya seemed like a foreign policy success story, Clinton was eager to take credit. As Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., noted, she made the rounds of all the talk shows to discuss it.
The Benghazi attack was the event that drove home the wrong-headedness of her advocacy and of her celebration — the still-unrecognized foolishness of the policy Clinton had clamored for.
This was not just the partisan opinion of Roskam and the other Republicans on the Benghazi committee. Jim Webb, the former Democratic senator and candidate for president, said nearly as much during the Democratic debate.
“This is not about Benghazi per se,” said Webb — who in contrast to Clinton had opposed the wars in both Iraq and Libya. “To me it is the inevitability of something like Benghazi occurring in the way that we intervened in Libya. We had no treaties at risk. We had no Americans at risk. There was no threat of attack or imminent attack … It is not a wise thing to do. And if people think it was a wise thing to do, try to get to the Tripoli airport today. You can’t do it.”
Clinton arrived on Capitol Hill for Thursday’s hearing with a set of prepared talking points, ready to defend herself over emails and YouTube videos and war profiteering by Sid Blumenthal, her informal adviser on Libya. Those topics came up, as they should, and nothing in them presented a new bombshell that will immediately destroy her candidacy for president.
The only “bombshell” was the oldest and most obvious one. She was not ready to defend the disaster that she and “smart power” helped bring upon Libya, because no one can.
