Libya Epitomizes Clinton's Not-So-Smart Power (In which she escalates terrorism)

National Interest ^ | Feb. 5, 2016 | Christopher A. Preble

[yoe]

A long profile on Hillary Clinton in the Washington Post earlier this week highlights (the 2011 Libyan intervention) as a key indicator of her approach to foreign policy. Clinton claims that the Libyan bombing campaign was an example of “smart power at its best.” If she actually believes that, it raises serious questions about her judgment, as well as about her ability to analyze foreign policy dispassionately and with the best interests of the United States at heart. If Clinton is willing to point to Libya as a “signature moment in her four-year tenure” as secretary of state, as the story says, then her resume is breathtakingly shallow.

[snip]But the Libyan gambit was never really about U.S. national security—which is why Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon and most of the senior members of the military ( opposed it). Some European countries, especially those along the Mediterranean, feared that an influx of Libyan refugees would pose a security challenge, and they could have sought U.S. help on those grounds.

[snip]“In retrospect,” Kuperman writes, “Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state.”

[yoe]

Continued from article: “Despite what defenders of the mission claim, there was a better policy available—not intervening at all. . . . Instead, Libya today is riddled with vicious militias and anti-American terrorists—and thus serves as a cautionary tale of how humanitarian intervention can backfire for both the intervener and those it is intended to help.”

Indeed, the ISIS presence in Libya has now grown to the point that there is open talk of another (major military intervention) to root them out. Meanwhile, the decision to overthrow a despotic ruler in a foreign country after he had chosen to turn over his rudimentary nuclear weapons program sent a very clear message to every other despotic ruler in the world: if you have nukes, don’t give them up; and if you don’t have them, get some.

If this is “smart power at its best,” as Clinton says, I would hate to see it at its worst.

HILLARY'S INSANITY IN LIBYA!

[rawcatslyentist]

But they had to create mass warfare over there.

Nobody would have tolerated their mass invasion plans otherwise.

[SunkenCiv]

Obama’s Libya Debacle
How a Well-Meaning Intervention Ended in Failure
By Alan J. Kuperman
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/libya/obamas-libya-debacle
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23297/model_humanitarian_intervention_reassessing_natos_libya_campaign.html
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23387/lessons_from_libya.html

Three Phony Reasons to Bomb Libya
Benjamin H. Friedman
March 25, 2011
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/three-phoney-reasons-bomb-libya-5073

Intervention in Libya and Syria Isn’t Humanitarian or Liberal
Benjamin H. Friedman
April 5, 2012
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/intervention-libya-syria-isn%E2%80%99t-humanitarian-or-liberal-6739

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/libya-epitomizes-clintons-not-so-smart-power-15130

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

bfl