As a contestant in the Presidential Reality Show, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues to endlessly boast of her “experience” and “judgment’ in foreign policy. But among her proud triumphs is supporting and masterminding the toppling of Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi, which has turned the country into another US-foreign-policy-made disaster.
While there are facts and allegations about Gadhafi’s role in financing the 1972 Munich Massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes and sending weapons and explosives to the Provisional Irish Republican Army to keep a decade of civil war going in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s, he was never a threat to the US, its NATO allies or Arab League states.
None of the positive contributions of the Gadhafi regime, including cracking down on Islamic funadmentalism and even dismantling his nuclear program, were ever recognized by Presdient Obama or Hillary Clinton. Instead, under the guise of humantiarian missions, in 2011 they strongly supported Britain and France when they sent air forces to clear the skies above Libya, attack Gadhafi’s forces, and usher in a democratic, free regime.
Except, of course, as in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, all they produced was a smashed, anarchic society where Islamic extremism was able to grow like kudzu.
On February 10, US Special Envoy For The Global Coalition To Counter ISIL Brett McGurk admitted as much to a hearing of the House Foreign Relations Committee.
McGurk called Libya “an emerging threat from Africa.” He admitted that ISIL fighters who find it increasingly difficult to enter Syria now are flooding into Libya instead, along with members of the equally ferocious Boko Haram terror movement in Nigeria.
“The ISIL core in Libya… drew a lot of recruits like a magnet,” McGurk said. “They are now telling their fighters don’t come into Syria, go to Libya… Libya is an emerging threat from Africa because a lot of the guys are pooling up to Libya from Africa.”
TRENDPOST: The brave new world that ISIL and Boko Haram are bringing to Libya and sub-Saharan Africa are not quite the democratic paradise Clinton and her advisers, Samantha Powers and Susan Rice, had in mind in 2011. McGurk confirmed reports that both movements sold women in slave markets and tried to slaughter Christian groups wherever they could.
The State Department, judicious as ever, has not characterized these activities as genocide. Its lawyers are still leisurely working out whether routine mass rape, enslavement, torture and enforced child sex constitute that.
Chalk up another triumph for the Democratic Party’s self-styled lifelong defender of women’s rights.
Martin Sieff