On Monday night, Hillary Clinton told an audience at an Illinois town hall hosted by MSNBC that the United States “didn’t lose a single person” in Libya during her disastrous tenure as secretary of state.
The gaffe, or better yet Freudian slip, came as Hillary was defending her decision to go full-Rambo on Libya, a move that effectively turned the country into a failed state. Clinton’s justification of her reckless foreign policy was basically a series of euphemisms on steroids.
“Now, is Libya perfect? It isn’t,” Clinton said in perhaps the most ridiculous understatement of the campaign season. “Libya was a different kind of calculation and we didn’t lose a single person … We didn’t have a problem in supporting our European and Arab allies in working with NATO.”
Cleverly, Clinton avoided stepping into the minefields of Benghazigate; she failed to mention the topic altogether.
As The Daily Wire recently explained, Hillary Clinton is personally responsible for the current bloodbath in Libya. According to a comprehensive New York Times investigation, former Secretary of State Clinton personally facilitated the arming of anti-Qaddafi Libyan rebels in the wake of 2011 Libyan civil war. Those same “rebels” are now tearing Libya apart limb by limb as sectarian forces battle for territorial control and political supremacy. Many of the rebels the Clinton State Department armed joined Islamist causes and defected to terrorism.
The New York Times reports:
Mrs. Clinton understood the hazards, but also weighed the costs of not acting, aides said. They described her as comfortable with feeling her way through a problem without being certain of the outcome.
President Obama ultimately took her side, according to the administration officials who described the debate. After he signed a secret document called a presidential finding, approving a covert operation, a list of approved weaponry was drawn up. The shipments arranged by the United States and other Western countries generally arrived through the port of Benghazi and airports in eastern Libya, a Libyan rebel commander said.
“Humvees, counterbattery radar, TOW missiles was the highest end we talked about,” one State Department official recalled. “We were definitely giving them lethal assistance. We’d crossed that line.”
When Clinton chose to arm the rebels and direct US bombers to attack Libya, she failed to plan for the rebuilding period and post-development work. Instead, she chose to “lead from behind,” assembling American airpower to blow Libya to hell without any prospect of returning it to normalcy.
Today Libya is a hub of jihadist activity. The Obama administration has done nothing to curb arms trafficking and terrorist activity in the country. The New York Times reports that ISIS has established operational command in Libya. It was only a matter of time before the Islamic terrorist group took advantage of the relatively unguarded desert.