Hundreds of people just died because of Obama and Hillary’s illegal Libyan war.
The Libyan War was based on a lie about genocide that is turning out to be real as ISIS beheads African Christians captured in Libya, as migrants claw their way abroad boats out of Libya, killing each other along the way, as a civil war between the legal government and the Muslim Brotherhood drags on.
The strange thing about left-wing wars is that we don’t talk about them. The UK is debating the Libyan War, with Cameron under attack from UKIP [1] and the left for his part in it, but in the US, it’s the forgotten war. The left has done its best to turn Benghazi into a contemptuous meme and the murder of four Americans into a joke. And there’s bound to be a meme for hundreds of migrants drowning as well.
Libya was never paradise, but Obama opted for regime change, while lying about it, and then took no responsibility for the consequences. The CIA backed Jihadist rebels, allowed Qatar, a state sponsor of terror, to smuggle weapons to terrorists [2] right past NATO, then it made a futile effort to get them back.
Obama did not have a plan for Libya except to let the terrorists win. And the terrorists have won.
Instead of ending the civil war, Obama perpetuated it. Libya is fragmented between a coalition of Al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood Jihadists and what is left of the elected government. The only good thing that can be said about Obama’s Libya policy is that we are officially backing the government. Just not with weapons or military support. Instead the administration criticized Egypt for carrying out air strikes against Jihadists who beheaded Coptic Christians and General Hifter for trying to fight the same Islamic terrorists who murdered four Americans in Benghazi, even though they’re doing what we should be.
The costs of Obama’s Libyan adventure have been high. They include an Al Qaeda franchise nearly capturing Mali and the resulting French intervention. They include the murder of Africans and Christians in Libya. They include an ongoing civil war that shows no signs of ending. And a number of Americans killed along the way, including four in an attack on a diplomatic mission in Benghazi.
And yet, in a strange Orwellian twist, this is the war that never existed. Obama and his people refused to call it a war. The media, which would never have reported on the troubles in Iraq without linking it to the war, doesn’t call it a war or mention that we might have had something to do with what’s going on.
Type in “Iraq War” and you’ll get plenty of results, but Obama’s Libyan bombing campaign is obscurely buried inside the country’s civil war, a development as odd as sandwiching the Iraq War within the Shiite uprising and the ISIS aftermath. And yet there’s a consistent pattern to these Orwellian cover-ups. Clinton’s own bombing campaign in Yugoslavia was likewise buried within a civil war. Obama declared the war in Iraq over while leaving thousands of troops in the country. He’s set to do the same thing in Afghanistan. His wars are meant to be invisible and unacknowledged. At least until they turn bloody.
But unlike Yugoslavia, Libya isn’t going away. It’s only getting bloodier. Like Iraq, where the media perpetuated the myth of a successful withdrawal until the genocide began, Libya keeps getting worse.
And sooner or later we’re going to have to talk about it.
Unlike Iraq, there is no one else to blame. And Hillary Clinton can’t shrug it off as Obama’s doing. Not when she was an aggressive champion of intervention.
The false claim of genocide which was used to justify a no-fly zone that served as a cover for regime change came from Hillary Clinton [3].
The Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all opposed the war. In a reversal of the usual clichés about warmongers, the Pentagon was highly skeptical and attempted to negotiate a truce with Libya. Hillary’s State Department rejected a peace venture by the military and forced a war.
For any Republican administration, the fact that an armchair warrior Secretary of State with presidential ambitions had illegally started a war over the objections of the military would be the ultimate story.
Instead it’s the Hillary story that cannot be told.
And yet it would be nice, if in between gushing over her highly scheduled visits to major brand name eateries and photogenic meetings with her own party’s staffers passed off as ordinary folks, someone in the media would ask Hillary why she wanted this war and what it was meant to accomplish.
But no such questions will be asked and no answers will be forthcoming.
The same media that incessantly manufactured Iraq War scandals seems utterly disinterested in the admission of former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, a Clinton loyalist, that the administration had lied to the United Nations and the American people and that its real goal had been regime change [4].
It has even less interest in a recording [4] featuring a Pentagon intelligence liaison stating that Obama had told members of Congress that Libya “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter”.
If only Obama and Clinton became Republicans tomorrow, then the media would begin running non-stop coverage of revelations that a rediscovered war had actually been based on lies.
Until then, Libya is a crisis with no root cause. Migrants swarm, terrorists kill, Al Qaeda runs training camps and ISIS beheads. But none of the chaos stems from anything. Obama never bombed Libya.
It all just happened on its own.
Obama was elected based on his foreign policy and that turned out to be a disaster. And while his foreign policy contains some coherent strands, such as pandering to the left on Cuba and to the Muslim Brotherhood on Egypt, much of it is incoherent and bordering on random.
The United States almost enlisted in Syrian regime change before throwing in its lot with Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq. Obama backs Saudi Arabia’s airstrikes against Iranian backed militias in Yemen, while conducting air strikes on behalf of Shiite militias in Iraq, but opposes Egypt’s air strikes against Al Qaeda in Libya. This administration ricochets wildly between Sunni and Shiite terrorists, alternately bombing and supporting them, out of what might as well be the advice of some Foggy Bottom Magic 8 Ball.
Now Hillary has to run on her foreign policy, because there simply isn’t anything else that she actually did. But the high point of her foreign policy was lying the country into a war that cost countless lives and then trying to cover up the resulting murder of four Americans by sending a filmmaker to jail [5].
The higher the death toll rises, the more difficult Hillary’s War will be to ignore.