An excerpt from, "Clinton owns the war in Libya" by David Harsanyi, The Detroit News, October 25, 2015:
Libya is in chaos. It’s a festering pit of radicalism, anarchy and death, epitomizing everything that can go wrong when Western intervention has no clear long-term purpose.
And a woman who believes she should be president of the United States — ostensibly on the strength of her decision-making abilities as secretary of state — believes that what’s going on in Libya is a success.
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But it was much more. She reiterated that she was the chief architect of the war in Libya. Clinton has to claim that the U.N.-authorized Libyan air campaign in 2011 was a model of successful foreign intervention, because Clinton was the one who urged President Barack Obama, over the strong misgivings of others, to intervene in that civil war. She brought the Arabs on board. She articulated many of the administration’s arguments.
Later, after the whole thing fell apart, she would falsely blame some obscure video for the whole thing.
Since then, Libya has fragmented into two rival factions, which have erased any pretense that democracy or freedom exists in the country. There are collective punishments as tens of thousands of political prisoners are thrown into camps. Violence is up. Proliferation of weapons has increased. Causalities have spiked since the war.An excerpt from, "How the west broke Libya and returned it to the hatred of the past" by Yasmina Khadra, The Guardian, October 22, 2015:
Gaddafi played a defining role in the rebuilding of the modern Libyan nation. By overthrowing the monarchy and declaring the Jamahiriya (a republic of the masses in which political power was to be passed to the people), the revolutionary army officer achieved what no sovereign before him had accomplished.
Born of the tribes and the outcasts, a wretched child destined for menial tasks and a lifetime of poverty, Gaddafi – thanks, in large part, to his humble roots – immediately won the adoration of the disadvantaged on the fringes of society and rallied the aggrieved and the rejected to his cause. But his greatest feat, after the coup d’etat, was absolutely remarkable: he succeeded in bringing together the intensely opposed ethnic groups of the north and south, who had always despised one another. To the casual western observer this might seem a basic achievement and of little import, but for an inveterate tribalist it is little short of a miracle.
For four decades Gaddafi acted as guarantor of the nation’s stability and a careful moderator between tribal leaders, reconciling warring parties and delicately handling the hangovers of the past that still awoke old demons from time to time. Gaddafi, as vigilant keeper of the flame, kept a weather eye open, heaping privileges on some and prestige on others in order to consolidate alliances and plaster over any cracks that threatened to appear.
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By toppling Gaddafi, Nato interfered with the order of things. Once the personal guarantor of national unity had been lynched by his compatriots, the Libyan people were left to their own devices in an appalling state of upheaval, with no roadmap to guide them.
