Africans are being sold at Libyan slave markets. Thanks, @HillaryClinton. usat.ly/2iWrl6L via @usatoday
'We came, we saw, he died,' she joked. But overthrowing Gadhafi was a humanitarian and strategic debacle that now limits our options on North Korea.
Footage from Libya, released recently by CNN, showed young men from sub-Saharan Africa being auctioned off as farm workers in slave markets.
And how did we get to this point? As the BBC reported back in May, “Libya has been beset by chaos since NATO-backed forces overthrew long-serving ruler Col. Moammar Gadhafi in October 2011.”
And who was behind that overthrow? None other than then-SOS Hillary Clinton.
Under George W. Bush in 2003, the United States negotiated an agreement with Libyan strongman Gadhafi: He would give up weapons of mass destruction peacefully, and we wouldn’t try to depose him.
Under George W. Bush in 2003, the United States negotiated an agreement with Libyan strongman Gadhafi: He would give up weapons of mass destruction peacefully, and we wouldn’t try to depose him.
That seemed a good deal at the time, but the Obama administration didn’t stick to it. Instead, in an operation spearheaded by Clinton, the United States went ahead and toppled him anyway.
The overthrow turned out to be a debacle. Libya exploded into chaos and civil war, and refugees flooded Europe, destabilizing governments there.
But at the time, Clinton thought it was a great triumph — "We came, we saw, he died,” she joked about Gadhafi’s overthrow — and adviser Sidney Blumenthal encouraged her to tout her "successful strategy" as evidence of her fitness for the highest office in the land.
It’s surprising the extent to which Clinton has gotten a pass for this debacle, which represents a humanitarian and strategic failure of the first order.
(And, of course, the damage is still compounding: How likely is North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons after seeing the worthlessness of U.S. promises to Gadhafi?)
Maybe it’s buried under the other Clinton/Obama debacles in the Middle East, such as the botched Syrian policy that The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt called ”a humanitarian and cultural disaster of epochal proportions.”
Remember President Obama’s “red line” that Syria crossed, and that Obama didn’t enforce?
That led to a destabilizing flood of refugees hitting Europe, too.
That led to a destabilizing flood of refugees hitting Europe, too.
And, of course, there’s the Yemen policy, which Obama bragged about as a model for the war on terror. But now Yemen is another war-wracked humanitarian and strategic disaster.
Still, Libya is in a class of its own. In Syria and Yemen, at least, the situation was already bad.
Still, Libya is in a class of its own. In Syria and Yemen, at least, the situation was already bad.
Libya, before Clinton got involved, was comparatively stable and no strategic threat to the United States or its allies. Now it’s a shambles, with people literally being sold in slave markets.
Back in the 2012 presidential campaign, Vice President Biden told a group of African Americans that the GOP was going to "put you all back in chains."
But it turned out that it was Clinton’s policies that led to black people being sold. As some ponder another Hillary Clinton run in 2020, that’s worth pointing out.
