Reprinted from the American Spectator.
Although Hillary Clinton lost her bid for the White House in part because of lingering public resentment over the 2012 terror attack that left four Americans dead in Benghazi, history will judge her even more harshly for her decisive role in the preceding U.S.-led military intervention in Libya.
In fact, then-Secretary of State Clinton was instrumental at three critical junctures in convincing President Obama to green-light and escalate the war to oust Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi.
First was her decisive role in the initial U.S. decision to lead a NATO air campaign in Libya. Under intense pressure from European and Arab governments to stop Qaddafi’s forces from stamping out the incipient rebellion, Obama administration officials were deeply divided. Those opposing intervention included Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Advisor Tom Donilon, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. Those in favor included Samantha Power, a senior aide at the National Security Council, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice.
Although Secretary Clinton ostensibly took no position at first, she worked to pave the way for the intervention Power and Rice were urging by brokering an Arab League resolution calling for an internationally enforced no-fly zone. With that in hand on March 12, she flew to Paris to meet with European officials and Libyan opposition leader Mahmoud Jibril, after which she pressed Obama heavily to intervene. Gates later said that Clinton’s advocacy “put the president on the 51 side” of a “51-49” decision to intervene.
So what if the Obama administration had allowed regime forces to win? Qaddafi’s Libya was no democracy, but it was an occasional partner in the war on terror and its human rights record was steadily improving. Indeed, one of the reasons radical Islamists were so well poised to seize control of the revolt is that Qaddafi (unlike other Arab dictators) had freed the large majority of them from his prisons.