The Economist reports that ISIS has established a strong foothold in the city of Sirte, which is in the middle of Libya’s Mediterranean coastline. ISIS reportedly controls about 180 miles of that coastline, centered on Sirte, and has 5000 fighters active there. It’s a sufficiently strong foothold for The Economist to urge Western action.
For this, we can thank Hillary Clinton. As Secretary of State, Clinton urged the Obama administration to pursue the toppling of the Gadhafi regime in 2011, an action that was taken despite Congressional opposition, and one that even the liberals at The Atlantic asserted was a violation of the War Powers Resolution. Libya has been a mess ever since, with four major players locked in a civil war and the nation as a whole crumbling into pre-technology and descending into lawlessness.
People are most likely to associate mentions of Clinton and Libya with the Benghazi incident and the partisan divides that have arisen therefrom after months of bickering and investigations. Clinton’s culpability for the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and three others is murky, apart from the generalized “buck stops here” that people at the top of their organizations are expected to face. This murkiness lets her defenders, apologists and blind sycophants wave off and roll their eyes at any mention of Benghazi, and leaves her critics unable to leverage the attacks and deaths into political fodder against her.
Clinton cannot, however, dodge responsibility for Libya as a whole. The Libya war was her baby, so the outcome is hers as well. There are no Republicans to blame, the administration in the White House is the same today as it was in 2011, and she has no one to throw under the bus. She bragged about Gadhafi’s death with a grisly joke, “We came, we saw, he died.” Certainly, Libya was no paradise under Gadhafi, and his (alleged but contested) predations were part of the justification for Western intervention, but the current situation is worse. Islamism has taken roots, both in the governments and in the form of ISIS, the atrocities of the past are mirrored today, and food and infrastructure are becoming major issues for the populace.
Clinton and her acolytes point to her tenure as Secretary of State as ipso facto proof of her foreign policy expertise, but results, not resume entries, are what matters. Her results in Libya are stark, damning and undeniable. She erred, badly. Worse, she has taken no responsibility and offered no mea culpa. She has chosen, instead, to portray the actions against Gadhafi in Libya as a template for American militarism. I wonder if that template includes providing arms that end up in the hands of ISIS.
The use of Benghazi as an issue against Clinton has grown stale. This is, at least in part, a strategic success for the Clinton camp and a vindication of the delay, deflect, stonewall tactics used to drag out the investigations. Those same tactics are being employed in the email scandal with similar outcome. Benghazi is also not a “smoking gun” scandal. While it is apparent that there were multiple bad decisions made, those bad decisions as likely the result of incompetence and bureaucratic ossification as of nefarious intent or coarse political calculation. As Hanlon’s Razor tells us, “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” From a political strategy perspective, Benghazi’s a combination of dead horse and vagueness. Libya as a whole, however, is not. It’s a giant mess that can be laid directly at the feet of the then-Secretary of State, who championed the effort.
I suspect Republicans may be averse to using Libya against Clinton because it brings into question the advisability of militarism in general, and might work against the GOP hawks’ own exhortations. It might also draw responses of “yeah, well, Bush screwed up too!” from the “nyah nyah nyah” crowd, but none of that diminishes Clinton’s failure and what it tells us about her judgment. From this, she can run, but she cannot hide.
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