The ouster of Qaddafi left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven.
By Jo Backer and Scott Shane, Feb 27, 2016, New York Times.
Here is an excellent video which summarized the long article below, prepared by New York Times investigators, Jo Backer and Scott Shane:[wait ~10 seconds for the video to arrive]\
Here are my Key notes of the following investigation report (by NY Times) which show that Hillary Clinton was a KEY PERSON in the decision and in the planning of the war to remove Gaddafi.
“… in March 2011. Mrs. Clinton pushed President Obama to join allies in airstrikes in Libya, and eventually pressed for a secret program to provide arms to rebel militias…”
* “Gadhafi was the best success the west had in the Arab world in his last 15 years, with a very good collaboration with the west”- declared by a top Israeli expert, Ari Shavit, on TV news panel.
* “Some senior US intelligence officials had deep misgivings about what would happen if Colonel Qaddafi lost control [in 2011]. In recent years, the Libyan dictator had begun aiding the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda in North Africa.”, as written on the NY times article below. http://www.nytimes.com/
*Gadhafi was a Bush success story. After US invaded Iraq, he made a call to George Bush Jr and tens of Galaxies went to Libya, dismantled the entire nuclear and chemical installations. As a result Libya was taken off the list of countries sponsoring terror.
* “Qaddafi said on March 2, 2011 that without him Libya would become a terrorist haven.“
….in the view of many who have watched her [Hillary] up close, her record on Libya illustrates how she was inclined to act — in marked contrast to Mr. Obama’s more reticent approach….
…On March 2011 at lunch with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, she [Hillary] “was tough, she was bullish” on the idea of intervention in Libya — the “perfect ally,” recalled Mr. Sarkozy’s senior diplomatic adviser, Jean-David Levitte….
…Mr. Sarkozy met with Mrs. Clinton and David Cameron, the British prime minister, at the Élysée Palace in Paris to discuss the next move . Sarkozy played his trump card. French fighter jets were already in the air, he said. But, he added, “this is a collective decision, and I will recall them if you want me to,” Mr. Levitte said. Mr. Sarkozy’s maneuver had abruptly pushed forward the timing of the operation, but for all of Mrs. Clinton’s irritation, she was not prepared to object….
..“I’m not going to be the one to recall the planes [stop the attack on Libya] …” she [Hillary] grumbled to an aide. And the bombing began….
…“Her view is, we can’t fail in this,” Mr. Ross said. “Once we have made a decision, we can’t fail.”..
American intelligence officials were worried about what would become of the country if Colonel Qaddafi lost control of it….”
Mrs. Clinton with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France in Paris on March 19, 2011, two days after a United Nations Security Council resolution authorized “all necessary means” to protect Libyan civilians.
Libya’s descent into chaos began with a rushed decision to go to war, made in what one top official called a “shadow of uncertainty” ….Mrs. Clinton foresaw some of the hazards of toppling another Middle Eastern strongman. She pressed for a secret American program that supplied arms to rebel militias, an effort never before confirmed.
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.”
Photo: Hillary visit Libya two days before Gaddafi was killed
“….Anne-Marie Slaughter, her director of policy planning at the State Department, notes that in conversation and in her memoir, Mrs. Clinton repeatedly speaks of wanting to be “caught trying.” In other words, she would rather be criticized for what she has done than for having done nothing at all….
“She’s very careful and reflective,” Ms. Slaughter said. “But when the choice is between action and inaction, and you’ve got risks in either direction, which you often do, she’d rather be caught trying.”
The New York Times’s examination of the intervention …. interviewed more than 50 American, Libyan and European officials, including many of the principal actors. Virtually all agreed to comment on the record. They expressed regret, frustration and in some cases bewilderment about what went wrong and what might have been done differently.
….Mrs. Clinton has also called for a more interventionist approach in Syria…. [my note: to support more terror organization rebels there].
Now Libya poses an outsize security threat to the region and beyond, calling into question whether the intervention [of USA] prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.
The answers are:
*The looting of Colonel Qaddafi’s vast weapons arsenals during the intervention has fed the Syrian civil war, empowered terrorist and criminal groups from Nigeria to Sinai, and destabilized Mali….
*…a quarter-million refugees were sent north across the Mediterranean [to Italy & Europe]. *…. A civil war in Libya has left the country with two rival governments, cities in ruins and more than 4,000 dead.
*Amid that fighting, the Islamic State has built its most important outpost on the Libyan shore, a redoubt to fall back upon as it is bombed in Syria and Iraq. With the Pentagon saying the Islamic State’s fast-growing force now numbers between 5,000 and 6,500 fighters, some of Mr. Obama’s top national security aides are pressing for a second American military intervention in Libya. On Feb. 19, American warplanes hunting a Tunisian militant bombed an Islamic State training camp in western Libya, killing at least 41 people.
*“We had a dream,” said Mr. Jibril, who served as Libya’s first interim prime minister. “And to be honest with you, we had a golden opportunity to bring this country back to life. Unfortunately, that dream was shattered.”
…Tom Donilon, the national security adviser; and Mr. Gates, the defense secretary,..”If the Europeans were so worried about Libya, they argued, let them take responsibility for its future.“
“Some senior US intelligence officials had deep misgivings about what would happen if Colonel Qaddafi lost control. In recent years, the Libyan dictator had begun aiding the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda in North Africa.”
“He was a thug in a dangerous neighborhood,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. “But he was keeping order.”
Mrs. Clinton diverged from the other senior members of the administration.
The comparison with Mr. Biden was revealing. For the vice president, according to Antony J. Blinken, then his national security adviser and now deputy secretary of state, the lesson of Iraq was crucial — “what Biden called not the day after, but the decade after.”
“What’s the plan?” Mr. Antony J. Blinken, then national security adviser :
“There is going to be some kind of vacuum, and how’s it going to be filled, and what are we doing to fill it?”
Hillary sparred constantly with her Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, who, Mrs. Clinton wrote in her memoir “Hard Choices,” was initially “dead set against a no-fly zone.”
About the time the air campaign began, Charles R. Kubic, a retired rear admiral, received a message from a senior Libyan military officer proposing military-to-military negotiations for a 72-hour cease-fire, potentially leading to an arranged exit for Colonel Qaddafi and his family.
But after he approached the American military command for Africa, Admiral Kubic said, he was directed to end the talks [note: USA is pushing Israeli to talk with Palestinian under any conditions even so Israeli agree, but Palestinian don’t want to talk]
A reader Comment: The mistake wasn’t in deposing Quaddafi but in not having a follow up plan. American troops should have been stationed in Libya to help…[my note: same as in Afghanistan, after Russian troops left and USA did not do anything to control Taliban and Al Qaida from getting stronger.
Summarized by Udi . Please forward
A body was carried from the rubble of a house in Tripoli, Libya, after a reported NATO airstrike in June 2011
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The whole article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/
Published on New York Times By Jo Backer and Scott Shane, Feb 27, 2016
Part of the above article on The New York Times shows the data on Hillary as a key person in Libya where “Mrs. Clinton pushed President Obama to join allies in airstrikes in Libya, and eventually pressed for a secret program to provide arms to rebel militias.” :
“It was late afternoon on March 15, 2011, and Mr. Araud had just left the office when his phone rang. It was his American counterpart, Susan E. Rice, with a pointed message.
France and Britain were pushing hard for a Security Council vote on a resolution supporting a no-fly zone in Libya to prevent Colonel Qaddafi from slaughtering his opponents. Ms. Rice was calling to push back, in characteristically salty language.
“She [Susan E. Rice] says, and I quote, ‘You are not going to drag us into your shitty war,’” said Mr. Araud, now France’s ambassador in Washington. “She said, ‘We’ll be obliged to follow and support you, and we don’t want to.’ The conversation got tense. I answered, ‘France isn’t a U.S. subsidiary.’ It was the Obama policy at the time that they didn’t want a new Arab war.”
In the preceding weeks, a series of high-level meetings had grappled with the escalating rebellion, and some younger White House aides believed the president should join the international effort.
But a far more formidable lineup was outspoken against an American commitment, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser; and Mr. Gates, the defense secretary, who did not want to divert American air power or attention away from Afghanistan and Iraq. If the Europeans were so worried about Libya, they argued, let them take responsibility for its future.
“I think at one point I said, ‘Can I finish the two wars I’m already in before you guys go looking for a third one?’” Mr. Gates recalled. Colonel Qaddafi, he said, “was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it.”
Some senior intelligence officials had deep misgivings about what would happen if Colonel Qaddafi lost control. In recent years, the Libyan dictator had begun aiding the United States in its fight against Al Qaeda in North Africa.
“He was a thug in a dangerous neighborhood,” said Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time. “But he was keeping order.”
Then there was Secretary Clinton. Early in Mr. Obama’s presidency, she had worked hard to win the trust of the man who had bested her in a tough primary campaign in 2008, and she sometimes showed anxiety about being cut out of his inner circle. (In one 2009 email, she fretted to aides: “I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet meeting this am. Is there? Can I go?”)
Mrs. Clinton had cultivated a close relationship with Mr. Gates. Both tended to be more hawkish than the president. They had raised concerns about how rapidly he wanted to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. More recently, they had argued that Mr. Obama should not be too hasty in dropping support for Hosni Mubarak, the embattled Egyptian leader, whom Mrs. Clinton had known since her years as the first lady.
But they had lost out to the younger aides — “the backbenchers,” Mr. Gates called them, who he said argued that in the moral clash of the Arab Spring, “Mr. President, you’ve got to be on the right side of history.”
In Libya, Mrs. Clinton had a new opportunity to support the historic change that had just swept out the leaders of its neighbors Egypt and Tunisia. And Libya seemed a tantalizingly easy case — with just six million people, no sectarian divide and plenty of oil.
But the debate was handicapped by sketchy intelligence. Top State Department officials were busy trying to evacuate the American Embassy, fearing that the Libyan leader might use diplomats as hostages. There was no inside information on whether, or on what scale, Colonel Qaddafi would carry out his threats.
“We, the U.S., did not have a particularly good handle on what was going on inside Libya,” said Derek Chollet, a State Department aide who moved to the National Security Council as the Libya debate began. American officials were relying largely on news reports, he said.
Human Rights Watch would later count about 350 protesters killed before the intervention — not the thousands described in some media accounts. But inside the Obama administration, few doubted that Colonel Qaddafi would do what it took to remain in power.
“Of course, he would have lined up the tanks and just gone after folks,” said David H. Petraeus, the retired general and former C.I.A. director.
Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s top foreign-policy aide at State and now in her campaign, said her view was that “we have to live in a world of risks.” In assessing the situation in Libya, he said, “she didn’t know for certain at the time, nor did any of us, what would happen — only that it passed a risk threshold that demanded that we look very hard at the response.”
So, after some initial doubts, Mrs. Clinton diverged from the other senior members of the administration.
The comparison with Mr. Biden was revealing. For the vice president, according to Antony J. Blinken, then his national security adviser and now deputy secretary of state, the lesson of Iraq was crucial — “what Biden called not the day after, but the decade after.”
“What’s the plan?” Mr. Blinken continued. “There is going to be some kind of vacuum, and how’s it going to be filled, and what are we doing to fill it?” Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous adage about Iraq — if “you break it, you own it” — loomed large.………….” [the whole article is on: http://www.nytimes.com/
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