Hillary Clinton, running for president, has not held a press conference in the past 88 days. You’d think she was running from something rather than for something. And maybe she is.
During that period, the State Department has released 16,700 of the emails she illegally concealed for years from the public and from lawful Freedom of Information requests.
In that same 88-day period since Clinton last faced unscreened press questions, 842 of those emails, which she stored on an insecure server in her own home, were deemed to contain national secrets that merit classified status. About two dozen were deemed Top Secret. One reportedly contained extremely sensitive information about an Afghan national who could have faced lethal retribution for collaborating with American intelligence services.
Perhaps Clinton is right to think she can get away with avoiding public scrutiny while Republicans march toward a cliff behind the banner of a terrible presidential candidate. She is almost certainly right in thinking that her Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders, is a spent force. She crushed him by embarrassingly large margin in South Carolina. And he threw in the towel anyway months ago when he declined to make an issue of her “damn emails.”
Perhaps nothing short of an indictment will make Clinton take an hour away from the scripted speeches to explain herself.
But one way or another, she needs to answer for the series running in this week’s New York Times, about the previously unknown extent of her involvement in this decade’s biggest foreign policy disaster.
Clinton, it turned out, was the one who persuaded a reluctant and skeptical President Obama to intervene in Libya, in what was described as a 51-49 decision on his part.
Everything that could have gone wrong in Libya did. The Benghazi attacks, in which four Americans died is a tiny part of the whole picture. When former Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., pointed out in the first Democratic debate that one cannot board a plane and fly to Tripoli, he was not exaggerating. Yet even in that debate, Clinton boasted of Libya as a success story of smart power.
The reality in Libya today condemns her lack of judgment in foreign policy. Libya is now a failed state with nothing resembling a real government, because preparation for a post-Gadhafi Libya was woefully inadequate. As one official told the Times, the State Department “did not have a particularly good handle on what was going on inside Libya.”
Libya is now a fast-growing second locus of Islamic State power, with 6,000 fighters under arms for that terrorist organization. A civil war rages between sevefal factions, and in the absence of American leadership some Arab nations have conducted air strikes in defiance of Washington’s stated wishes. Gadhafi’s arsenals were looted and those weapons are now being used by Islamic terrorists and criminals in places as distant as Syria and Nigeria.
To date, Bernie Sanders has been completely ineffective in challenging Clinton on Libya. Democrats feel the Benghazi attacks happened on in fevered right-wing discussion.
But the military intervention in Libya has had tragic real consequences, not unlike the ones that occurred after the war Clinton supported in Iraq. The United Nations High Commission on Refugees estimates that there are more than 430,000 internally displaced persons in Libya, and as many as a million who have fled the country. That is more than 20 percent of Libya’s total population.
Clinton now wants to be president. Our view is that she is wholly unsuitable for that office. But she certainly should not gain it by default. The nation could not afford such a thing. It’s time for her to open the floor to questions and provide real answers.
