Hillary Clinton channeling Bush-Blair in LibyaI'm gonna get personal here. From 2002 until the end of his days I in my insignificant way ceaselessly attacked George W. Bush and Tony Blair over Afghanistan and Iraq. Not because I was a peacenik but because their whole Middle East policy was one blind existentialist leap into hubris. "We're good at nation building" Bush declared from the deck of an aircraft carrier. None of it was true. There were no weapons of mass destruction to find in Iraq, just as the UN inspector reported. And if we got a "B" for the success of the invasion, we (meaning Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and so on) sure got an "F" for the occupation. We weren't good at nation-building at all.
What we were really good at was nation-destruction. Still are.
It was incomprehensible how Bush got re-elected in 2004 but he did. Republicans were blind and stalwart in their loyalty, but Independents were blind too to anything besides the fear drummed up by the GOP campaign over terrorism. Bush was fighting a war against terrorism, was he not? Never mind that he created anarchy whereever he went and that Iraq was about to go from bad to worse, based on the foundations he laid. A new offshoot of al Qaeda was being born in Anbar Province, and when that threat was met, literally by bribing tribal leaders to fight against al Qaeda,
The Bush-Blair-neocon pipe dream of a Western ally in Iraq and pro-American foothold in the Middle East is long finished and the smoke cleared away in the harsh light of day. (What were they smoking in those pipes?)
Now, today, Iraq is closer to Iran than to the USA, and U.S. policy of throwing Saddam's Sunnis out of their jobs meant not only a slower rebuilding of Iraq but that Sunni refugees would be idle and embittered and willing and able to move from insurgency to forming what became known as ISIS/ISIL.
The buck stops with President Obama, but the main advocate for regime change in Libya was the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.
For decades we in the West portrayed Mohammar Khadaffy [or Qadaffi or whatever] as a bad actor, a source of internatinal terrorism. But by the new millennium that was no longer true. To an extent he came to be thought of as an American ally. Not that he was domesticated, but in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion he dropped all threats of obtaining nuclear weapons and was actively informing about al Qaeda. With his Rudolph Valentinoesque sense of style, his living in a palatial tent, his bodyguard of female amazons, his oblique way of speaking, he became something of a star on TV interview programs, sort of a desert Salvadore Dali with guns.
When there was a new president in the USA and Arab Spring made its way to Libya, there was a quandary in the White House and environs: what to do? or to do nothing? The first inclination was to sit on the fence and to allow France to go it pretty much alone.
But then Hillary Clinton became won over to the notion of regime change in Libya and began lobbying for American action. Her view prevailed, apparently because of her influence within the administration.
And it was to a degree Iraq all over again, except this time, we were in contact from the get-go with those who labeled themselves as leaders of the rebels.
But there were many rebels, and many leaders. And few shared visions of the future of Libya. And the result was basically chaos. And in that chaos, ISIS has taken root.
Not only did Hillary Clinton channel George W and Tony Blair, but her supporters are right now channeling Republicans in their blind support of Hillary.
And Hillary refuses to admit she made a misjudgment. And her supporters refuse to understand that she is running on a record of experience that includes a major on-going blunder in Libya. We are back to 2004, with different parties and players but common themes of denial and delusion.
Enough of my opinionizing. Here's the genuine owsley on Libya and responsibility for it:
www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/libya-isis-hillary-clinton.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0
