How Government Makes Things Worse: Libya and Africa

In this case, I should point my fingers directly at Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton who decided to join our European client states in attacking Libya so Europe would have access to cheaper oil. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was subsequently killed. ("We came, we saw, he died" Hillary would later quip). The government collapsed and the country fell into a failed state and civil war. But since Hillary, Obama, and other Leftist's prime commandment is "do what thy wilt," they never thought of the consequences. So, here we are over a decade on and northern Africa is still roiling due to the consequences of the Nobel Peace Prize winner's decision to create a failed state where Libya once was. 

    In "Niger's crisis began in Libya" by Branko Mercetic, he explains that what we are seeing in the states along the southern edge of the Sahara is a consequence of Obama's and Hillary's action in Libya. Mercetic begins:

    The events in Niger over the past few months have been alarming to watch. What began as a military coup now risks spiraling into a wider war in West Africa, with a group of juntas lining up to fight against a regional force threatening to invade and restore democratic rule in Niamey.

    The junta have explicitly justified their coup as a response to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” plaguing Niger and complained that it and other countries in the Sahel “have been dealing for over 10 years with the negative socioeconomic, security, political and humanitarian consequences of NATO’s hazardous adventure in Libya.” Even ordinary Nigeriens backing the junta have done the same.

    The episode thus reminds us of an iron rule of foreign interference: Even military interventions considered successful at the time have unintended effects that cascade long after the missions formally end.

    The 2011 Libyan adventure saw the U.S., French and British governments launch an initially limited humanitarian intervention to protect civilians that quickly morphed into a regime change operation, unleashing a torrent of violence and extremism across the region.

The reasons for the attack on Libya were supposedly for humanitarian purposes ("we have to destroy the village to save it") but the concerns were exaggerated and largely baseless. Rather, Gaddafi was fighting Muslim extremists (ed: undoubtedly funded by Israel) that threatened his country. But for the warmongers in government, it was enough. Mercetic continues:

    Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) [ed: probably one of the most vile men to have ever lived], Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Kerry (D-Mass.) all called for a no-fly zone. “I love the military ... [ed: except for the Vietnam POWs] but they always seem to find reasons why you can’t do something rather than why you can,” complained McCain. The American Enterprise Institute’s Danielle Pletka said it would be “an important humanitarian step.” The now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) think tank gathered a who’s who of neoconservatives to repeatedly urge the same. In a letter to then-President Barack Obama, they quoted back Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech in which he argued that “inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”

    Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reportedly instrumental in persuading Obama to act, was herself swayed by similar arguments. Friend and unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal assured her that, once Gaddafi fell, “limited but targeted military support from the West combined with an identifiable rebellion” could become a new model for toppling Middle Eastern dictators. Pointing to the similar, deteriorating situation in Syria, Blumenthal claimed that “the most important event that could alter the Syrian equation would be the fall of Gaddafi, providing an example of a successful rebellion.” (Despite Gaddafi’s ouster, the Syrian civil war continues to this day, and its leader Bashar al-Assad is still in power).

    Likewise, columnist Anne-Marie Slaughter urged Clinton to think of Kosovo and Rwanda, where “even a small deployment could have stopped the killing,” and insisted U.S. intervention would “change the image of the United States overnight.” ...

The article continues:

    Despite grave and often-stated reservations, Obama and NATO got UN authorization for a no-fly zone. Clinton was privately showered with email congratulations, not just from Blumenthal and Slaughter (“bravo!”; “No-fly! Brava! You did it!”), but even from then-Bloomberg View Executive Editor James Rubin (“your efforts ... will be long remembered”). Pro-war voices like Pletka and Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz immediately began moving the goalposts by discussing Gaddafi’s ouster, suggesting escalation to prevent a U.S. “defeat,” and criticizing those saying Libya wasn’t a vital U.S. interest.

    NATO’s undefined war aims quickly shifted, and officials spoke out of both sides of their mouths. Some insisted the goal wasn’t regime change, while others said Gaddafi “needs to go.” It took less than three weeks for FPI Executive Director Jamie Fly, the organizer of the neocons’ letter to Obama, to go from insisting it would be a “limited intervention” that wouldn’t involve regime change, to professing “I don’t see how we can get ourselves out of this without Gaddafi going.”

    After only a month, Obama and NATO allies publicly pronounced they would stay the course until Gaddafi was gone, rejecting the negotiated exit put forward by the African Union. “There is no mission creep,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted two months later. Four months after that, Gaddafi was dead — captured, tortured and killed thanks in large part to a NATO airstrike on the convoy he was traveling in.

    With Gaddafi gone, our smart and talented elites gave each other pats on the back and congratulated each other on their brilliance, despite some grumbling that the actions had gone well beyond the UN mandate. And then came the fallout:

... Gaddafi’s toppling not only led hundreds of Tuareg mercenaries under his employ to return to nearby Mali but also caused an exodus of weapons from the country, leading Tuareg separatists to team up with jihadist groups and launch an armed rebellion in the country. Soon, that violence triggered its own coup and a separate French military intervention in Mali, which quickly became a sprawling Sahel-wide mission that only ended nine years later with the situation, by some accounts, worse than it started. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the majority of the more than 400,000 refugees in the Central Sahel were there because of the violence in Mali.

    Mali was far from alone. Thanks to its plentiful and unsecured weapons depots, Libya became what UK intelligence labeled the “Tesco” of illegal arms trafficking, referring to the British supermarket chain. Gaddafi’s ouster “opened the floodgates for widespread extremist mayhem” across the Sahel region, retired Senior Foreign Service officer Mark Wentling wrote in 2020, with Libyan arms traced to criminals and terrorists in Niger, Tunisia, Syria, Algeria and Gaza, including not just firearms but also heavy weaponry like antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles. By last year, extremism and violence was rife throughout the region, thousands of civilians had been killed and 2.5 million people had been displaced.

Of course, as the article continues, the situation is worse in Libya than ever before. Obama and Hillary long ago distanced themselves from the debacle. And, as the author concludes, we now face a regional war that could drag the U.S. into the fighting.