Hillary Clinton Has No Regrets About Libya. If Democrats prefer to tie the chaos in today’s Middle East, specifically the rise of the Islamic State, to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, the Republican history of the Middle East seems to start with the inauguration of President Barack Obama and the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as his first secretary of state in January 2. For the GOP, it was Clinton who let chaos and Islamic militants spread across the region because of her active support for the Libya intervention – and as the general election approaches, Republicans are making Libya’s fallout a cornerstone of their attacks the Democratic frontrunner. But, in speaking with Clinton’s closest aides and advisors, it’s clear that she has already formulated a detailed defense.
Clinton, they say, does not see the Libya intervention as a failure, but as a work in progress. The key lesson she has drawn from Libya is not that the United States should always avoid intervention or steer clear from the Middle East altogether, but that it needs to deepen its commitment to the region and find longer- term ways to engage with it. Whether or not the American public accepts that argument, it has clearly shaped Clinton’s present thinking on foreign policy. On the campaign trail, Clinton has not shied from defending her decision to support the intervention that toppled dictator Muammar al- Qaddafi. I think President Obama made the right decision at the time,” she said in the first Democratic debate in October as she pointed to the 2. General Assembly elections in which Libyans voted mostly for moderate parties. But that answer focused on the more promising days of 2.
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U. S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and the country’s descent into civil war. We are now, of course, in 2. How does Clinton make sense of what went wrong in Libya in the years since she left the State Department? Her answer to that question is one of the keys to understanding how she will approach the Middle East if she makes it to the White House.“[The Republicans] are going to make a big effort to suggest that the current instability in Libya reflects on the secretary,” one Clinton campaign aide told me. But the secretary feels confident … people will see that her decision- making and her leadership helped save us from a scenario where it could have come become another Syria.”The last part of that statement raises a key question: Are Clinton aides saying that Obama should have intervened in Syria?
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None of them will get into an extended discussion about the differences between the two, but more on that later. Obama and Clinton publicly addressed the fallout from the Libyan intervention in very different terms, which reflect not only a different diagnosis of what went wrong but also their divergent visions of American power. Three times now, Obama has alluded to regrets about the failure to plan for the day after, most recently this past Sunday on Fox News. Obama said that while the intervention “was the right thing to do” the worst mistake of his presidency was failing to prepare for the day after the fall of Qaddafi.
In a recent interview with the Atlantic, he also said “there’s room for criticism” of the international approach, saying he “had more faith in the Europeans” to stabilize the country than was warranted. To some extent, Obama’s self- criticism overcompensates. There was plenty of planning for the “day after” during the eight- month NATO intervention. Even as the Libya uprising unfolded already in early March, the National Security Council established a working group to plan the post- Qaddafi period, led by National Security Advisor Tom Donilon and drawing heavily on the experience of NSC officials like Samantha Power, now ambassador to the U. N. and Michael Mc. Faul, former ambassador to Moscow. Officials were quoted at the time as saying they were working to avoid the postwar mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Former State Department officials also deny that anyone underestimated the amount of international support a post- Qaddafi Libya would need. Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department and now her senior policy advisor on the campaign, insisted that diplomats felt they were mostly accomplishing their goals in the immediate post- Qaddafi period. Clinton’s advisors and aides point instead to two other key factors they believe contributed to the inability of the United States to stop Libya from fracturing: the Libyans’ refusal to allow any foreign security presence on their territory and the political aftermath of the attack on the U. S. embassy in Benghazi. What the Obama administration may have underestimated isn’t so much the work that was needed, but the role that Libyans would play in their own future. U. S. officials and their critics often simultaneously underestimate and overestimate the power of Washington to make things happen in foreign countries. Both the United States and Europe offered a wide range of assistance after Qaddafi’s fall, including help in demobilizing militants, collecting weapons, and reforming ministries, but Libyans dragged their feet, refused help, or were unable to deliver.
But key was the Libyan government’s refusal of any international forces from the outset. On Aug. 3. 1, 2. 01. Tripoli, U. N. Secretary- General Ban Ki- moon said he wanted to “get U. N. personnel on the ground absolutely as quickly as possible, under a robust Security Council mandate.” Ban’s special advisor for Libya, Ian Martin, had already drawn up an extensive plan that envisaged U. N. police and military observers and an interim protection force for the observers. The Libyans, however, wouldn’t let the strategy move forward. This eventually made it hard even for the United Nations to operate.
A European diplomat told me the U. N. mission negotiated for six months to even be allowed 2.
From my perspective, this was the font of all the challenges, the fact that they wouldn’t accept a U. N. presence or any meaningful security assistance,” Sullivan said. “Without security, there was a much lower chance of success.”Going in with a heavy military presence against the wishes of the local government was not an option, and would have been hugely unpopular in the United States. Not only did the Libyan authorities not allow any foreign security forces, they never dealt decisively with the militias that proliferated during the war, as rebels worked to oust Qaddafi. This undermined efforts to build a national army, intensified tribal divisions, and accelerated the descent into factional fighting that would eventually split the country into two warring halves. But the tragic attack in Benghazi on Sept. Ambassador Stevens’ life, is what irrevocably damaged Washington’s Libya policy.
Following the attack, American personnel were evacuated from Libya, including the small State Department team. Coming two months before the U. S. presidential election, the fallout became toxically politicized on all sides, distorting the debate and undermining Libya policy.“What effectively happened after Benghazi was the U. S. took what was already a modest toolbox in Libya, and we went home,” said another Clinton campaign advisor, Derek Chollet, who served as deputy chief for policy planning under Clinton until 2. National Security Council staff before serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security until 2.
What little progress we were making, and we were making progress before September 2. Chollet said. “What was a difficult effort became virtually impossible.”Embedding any advisors inside ministries to guide reform efforts became a nonstarter. Plans to help with organizing budgets or transitional justice, or programs that the Pentagon was handling such as training armed forces, became almost an insurmountable challenge. The Benghazi attack came two months after the parliamentary elections and soon after the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting when everything comes to a standstill in Muslim countries. By September, work should have begun in earnest to formulate new policies and reforms and help with governance — work that Stevens would have wanted to help guide. Instead, there was a run for the exits.“We were in the process of developing precisely those plans when they were derailed by a devastating blow from which we never fully recovered,” wrote Ben Fishman, former national security council director for Libya, in a recent article.