2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumObama admits his worst mistake...Hillary's Libyan regime change.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/10/politics/obama-libya-biggest-mistake/Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Hillary's foreign policy judgement.
Is Obama going under the limo with Jimmy Carter today?
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
FreakinDJ
(17,644 posts)Obama was right in banning Hillary's choice Sidney Blummenthal from working in the State Dept.
Too bad Hillary violated Obama's trust and forwarded Blummenthal's recommendations on Libya
Buzz Clik
(38,437 posts)Care to edit your title, or are you happy with posting pure bullshit?
Barack_America
(28,876 posts)Changing his mind on Libya was her "big win", according to her emails.
amborin
(16,631 posts)Let's Remember Hillary's Key Role in Creating Chaos in Libya; Now ISIS Has Capitalized:
the self-described Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has long been making a push to capitalize on the chaos in Libya.
For over a year, it has carried out terror attacks, taken over territory and released propaganda from its franchise in Libya. Now, a new assessment from the Pentagon states the number of ISIS fighters in Libya has doubled since the fall to over 5,000, spurring fresh debate among security officials over the possibility of foreign intervention.
Analysts and officials worry that Libya is increasingly becoming a sort of fallback option for ISIS as it loses territory and power in Syria and Iraq.
“If we look at the raw numbers, the presence of ISIS is definitely strengthening and growing. I think the security threat they pose is definitely going up,” Riccardo Fabiani, senior North Africa analyst at political risk research firm Eurasia Group, told The WorldPost.
The threat ISIS presents in Libya is different than in other nations, and is related both to the group's changing capabilities and to the country's ongoing instability
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/isis-presence-in-libya_us_56b369e2e4b08069c7a6352f
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
New York Times Feb 28, 2016
Hllary Clinton's Smart Power and A Dictator's Fall
President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.
snip
The Libya Gamble
An examination of the American intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it.
Did the opposition’s Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?
snip
Mrs. Clinton was won over........
Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces.
In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.
The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.
amborin
(16,631 posts)This is how Hillary pushed Obama---against his better inclination----to bomb Libya. Part of her neocon perspective, and no doubt influenced by Kissinger, her self-proclaimed role model.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
New York Times Feb 28, 2016
Hllary Clinton's Smart Power and A Dictator's Fall
President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.
In her suite at the Westin, she and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fast-moving military situation in Libya. But Mrs. Clinton was clearly also thinking about Iraq, and its hard lessons for American intervention.
The Libya Gamble
An examination of the American intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it.
Did the opposition’s Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?
snip
Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”
Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces.
In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.
The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.
This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state
snip
Here's what we have in Libya Today:
What We Know About ISIS in Libya
The self-described Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has long been making a push to capitalize on the chaos in Libya.
For over a year, it has carried out terror attacks, taken over territory and released propaganda from its franchise in Libya. Now, a new assessment from the Pentagon states the number of ISIS fighters in Libya has doubled since the fall to over 5,000, spurring fresh debate among security officials over the possibility of foreign intervention.
Analysts and officials worry that Libya is increasingly becoming a sort of fallback option for ISIS as it loses territory and power in Syria and Iraq.
“If we look at the raw numbers, the presence of ISIS is definitely strengthening and growing. I think the security threat they pose is definitely going up,” Riccardo Fabiani, senior North Africa analyst at political risk research firm Eurasia Group, told The WorldPost.
The threat ISIS presents in Libya is different than in other nations, and is related both to the group's changing capabilities and to the country's ongoing instability
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/isis-presence-in-libya_us_56b369e2e4b08069c7a6352f
13
This is the 2nd Part of the NY Times' In-depth reporting of Hillary's disastrous judgement. She pushed Obama to bomb Libya, against Obama's wishes, and against the advise of all other wise people including Biden and Gates.
Like Bush, Hillary's Mission Accomplished Moment Is Cringe-worthy and Scary.
Hillary's Libya Gamble: A New Libya, With ‘Very Little Time Left’
t was a grisly start to the new era for Libya, broadcast around the world. The dictator was dragged from the sewer pipe where he was hiding, tossed around by frenzied rebel soldiers, beaten bloody and sodomized with a bayonet. A shaky cellphone video showed the pocked face of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “the Leader” who had terrified Libyans for four decades, looking frightened and bewildered. He would soon be dead.
The first news reports of Colonel Qaddafi’s capture and killing in October 2011 reached the secretary of state in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she had just sat down for a televised interview. “Wow!” she said, looking at an aide’s BlackBerry before cautiously noting that the report had not yet been confirmed. But Hillary Clinton seemed impatient for a conclusion to the multinational military intervention she had done so much to organize, and in a rare unguarded moment, she dropped her reserve.
“We came, we saw, he died!” she exclaimed.
Two days before, Mrs. Clinton had taken a triumphal tour of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and for weeks top aides had been circulating a “ticktock” that described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment.
The timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish.” The memo’s language put her at the center of everything: “HRC announces … HRC directs … HRC travels … HRC engages,” it read.
It was a brag sheet for a cabinet member eyeing a presidential race, and the Clinton team’s eagerness to claim credit for her prompted eye-rolling at the White House and the Pentagon. Some joked that to hear her aides tell it, she had practically called in the airstrikes herself.
But there were plenty of signs that the triumph would be short-lived, that the vacuum left by Colonel Qaddafi’s death invited violence and division.
In fact, on the same August day that Mr. Sullivan had compiled his laudatory memo, the State Department’s top Middle East hand, Jeffrey D. Feltman, had sent a lengthy email with an utterly different tone about what he had seen on his own visit to Libya.
In the ensuing months, Mr. Feltman’s memo would prove hauntingly prescient. But Libya’s Western allies, preoccupied by domestic politics and the crisis in Syria, would soon relegate the country to the back burner.
And Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/libya-isis-hillary-clinton.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=span-ab-top-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
JudyM
(29,251 posts)Hubris.
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)Scuba
(53,475 posts)Barack_America
(28,876 posts)CentralCoaster
(1,163 posts)
bjo59
(1,166 posts)Even when a US policy decision didn't work out that well, it just looks like that from our (the American people's) perspective. If you look at it from the interests that really count (corporate, banking, pentagon, NATO etc.), so-called "mistakes" start looking like they are actually successes. Horribly, tragically successful from global power's point of view. No, not a ringing endorsement of position(s) Hillary took as Secretary of State, true, but she didn't force him to agree and whether he'd like her to take the rap for Libya or not, he's still tacitly supporting her as the Democratic candidate for president. I highly doubt he'll let the personal computer/email thing go anywhere while he's still president either, at least not until she's secured the Democratic nomination. There's no way that the powers that be (that have heavily funded both Obama and both Clintons) are going to let Bernie get in there and ruin what they've built over the past decades. (Hope I'm proven wrong on that last claim!)
dsc
(52,162 posts)I can fully understand why you didn't quote any of the piece, I wouldn't have either if I wanted to tell a totally dishonest tale.
President Barack Obama said the worst mistake of his presidency was a lack of planning for the aftermath of the 2011 toppling of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
"Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya," he said in a Fox News interview aired Sunday.
This is not the first time in recent weeks he has talked about Libya and the NATO-led intervention which resulted in Gadhafi's death in October of that year, months after NATO first intervened.
In a profile published last month in The Atlantic, the President told author Jeffrey Goldberg that British Prime Minister David Cameron became "distracted by a range of other things" after the operation.
Cameron, along with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, took the brunt of Obama's criticism.
It wasn't the actual removal of Gadhafi that he had problems with it was the aftermath and he largely blames Europe and frankly rightfully so.
Barack_America
(28,876 posts)At whose insistence?
msongs
(67,413 posts)dsc
(52,162 posts)so they were a pretty strong coalition. This wasn't a US only or even mostly US effort. They did nearly all the bombing.
JudyM
(29,251 posts)was the problem, at least in the video of the interview. He goes out of his way to actually say that going into Libya was the right decision.
I wish it were the other way around... because that would be calling her judgment directly into question. He blames it on Cameron, instead.
Bread and Circus
(9,454 posts)pheh
oberliner
(58,724 posts)It is the second line in the article at the link you provided.
He thought that the Europeans who pushed for the intervention (particularly Britain and France) would have been more invested in the aftermath, which they apparently were not.
nichomachus
(12,754 posts)Did you expect him to say he was snookered in by his bungling SOS?
There was a reason that, by the end of her tenure, they were holding cabinet meetings and not telling her about them. They were cutting her out of the loop.
oberliner
(58,724 posts)What is your source for this claim?
DetroitSocialist83
(169 posts)In the next debate. Sanders keeps saying we don't plan for the day after. Now he can quote her old boss and sitting president directly.
Cheese Sandwich
(9,086 posts)No doubt about it.
Jitter65
(3,089 posts)He thought it was the right thing to do but
"Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya," he said in a Fox News interview aired Sunday."
That was the mistake he was referring to.
