Hillary Clinton

[The Exception]

How is Clinton SEE?

[Jarno]

who cares, who is hillary anyways. Trump is the new president, fuck yeah! Hillary go back into the kitchen fuck yeah!

[Persephone]

LSI works

[darya]

Yeah, LSI.

[Kill4Me]

Pretty clear LSE. She's too engaging. Look at a picture of her and the eyes. The energy is extroverted positive. A very similar qualia to George w bush and Bill O'reilly. LSI holds in more, energy wise. The LSI is more bunkered down and reserved. Putin, Dick Cheney, Sammy Gravano, Stalin, Bill Bellichick. LSI shies away from conversation, words, smiling....its like bellichick's endorsement of trump, he did it by email. Hillary smiled a lot during the debates. Too much for any LSI. Google her name and look through her images. The energy is sloppy, the mobility of expression is not super minimal. then go google putin, cheney, gravano, stalin, bellichick....what do you see, nothing, a smile here and there but for the most part a stony unmoved disposition, a lack of desire to draw attention towards one self through any expression that might open up a pathway for connection with the interlocutor. the LSI face is extremely immobile and contains the most economic use of facial expressions. Hillary has wide elastic smiles in some pictures while simultaneously raising her eye lids to pop out her eyes at somebody or something.

she's the more compliant, establishment-oriented subtype of LSE, the LSE-Si.

[Beautiful sky]

Yeah, LSI.

You lover don't you

[The Reality Denialist]

LSI... I think

[strangeling]

The day Trump becomes president?

He is?

[strrrng]

Ti-LSI 1w2 so/sp

[Jarno]

so she's likely lsi as i hear from everybody here. and billy was See? i can see how billy wanted other girls.

[Park]

He is?

Dunno.

[strangeling]

^ heh, almost sounds like house of cards.

[HERO]

http://www.themillions.com/2012/04/t...s-greater.html

The literary critic George Steiner has provided the most authoritative resolution to the problem with his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, which positions Tolstoy as “the foremost heir to the tradition of the epic” and Dostoevsky as “one of the major dramatic tempers after Shakespeare.” Isaiah Berlin considered the seemingly opposing qualities of the two authors in his enduring essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” Nabokov argued in Lectures on Russian Literature that it was Tolstoy in a landslide, while America’s First Ladies have tended to give the nod to Dostoevsky: both Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush cite The Brothers Karamazov as their favorite novel.


https://newrepublic.com/article/7034...rican-politics

How Dostoevsky Explains American Politics

BY JASON ZENGERLE (October 15, 2009)

“Avi Zenilman makes a great catch. Both Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton cite the Brothers Karamazov as their favorite piece of literature, but they took away completely opposite messages from it, with one reading it as an affirmation of faith and the other believing it's a testament to doubt. Any guesses as to who thought what.”



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us...ibya.html?_r=0

THE LIBYA GAMBLE: PART 1

Hillary Clinton, ‘Smart Power’ and a Dictator’s Fall

The president was wary. The secretary of state was persuasive. But the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi left Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven.

By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE (FEB. 27, 2016)


By the time Mahmoud Jibril cleared customs at Le Bourget airport and sped into Paris, the American secretary of state had been waiting for hours. But this was not a meeting Hillary Clinton could cancel. Their encounter could decide whether America was again going to war.

In the throes of the Arab Spring, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was facing a furious revolt by Libyans determined to end his quixotic 42-year rule. The dictator’s forces were approaching Benghazi, the crucible of the rebellion, and threatening a blood bath. France and Britain were urging the United States to join them in a military campaign to halt Colonel Qaddafi’s troops, and now the Arab League, too, was calling for action.

President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out. Still, he dispatched Mrs. Clinton to sound out Mr. Jibril, a leader of the Libyan opposition. Their late-night meeting on March 14, 2011, would be the first chance for a top American official to get a sense of whom, exactly, the United States was being asked to support.

In her suite at the Westin, she and Mr. Jibril, a political scientist with a doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, spoke at length about the fast-moving military situation in Libya. But Mrs. Clinton was clearly also thinking about Iraq, and its hard lessons for American intervention.

Did the opposition’s Transitional National Council really represent the whole of a deeply divided country, or just one region? What if Colonel Qaddafi quit, fled or was killed — did they have a plan for what came next?

“She was asking every question you could imagine,” Mr. Jibril recalled.

Mrs. Clinton was won over. Opposition leaders “said all the right things about supporting democracy and inclusivity and building Libyan institutions, providing some hope that we might be able to pull this off,” said Philip H. Gordon, one of her assistant secretaries. “They gave us what we wanted to hear. And you do want to believe.”

The Libya Gamble

An examination of the American intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it.

Her conviction would be critical in persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces. In fact, Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.

The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.

This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House, campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.


Hillary Clinton’s Legacy in Libya

As the secretary of state in 2011, Hillary Clinton pressed the Obama administration to intervene militarily in Libya, with consequences that have gone far beyond the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

From the earliest days of the Libya debate, Mrs. Clinton was a diligent student and unrelenting inquisitor, absorbing fat briefing books, inviting dissenting views from subordinates, studying foreign counterparts to learn how to win them over. She was a pragmatist, willing to improvise — to try the bank-shot solution. But above all, in the view of many who have watched her up close, her record on Libya illustrates how, facing a national-security or foreign-policy quandary, she was inclined to act — in marked contrast to Mr. Obama’s more reticent approach.

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 offers a detailed accounting of how Mrs. Clinton’s deep belief in America’s power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms. The Times 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.

Was the mistake the decision to intervene in the first place, or the mission creep from protecting civilians to ousting a dictator, or the failure to send a peacekeeping force in the aftermath?

Mrs. Clinton declined to be interviewed. But in public, she has said it is “too soon to tell” how things will turn out in Libya and has called for a more interventionist approach in Syria.

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” as to Colonel Qaddafi’s intentions. The mission inexorably evolved even as 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.

Only after Colonel Qaddafi fell and what one American diplomat called “the endorphins of revolution” faded did it become clear that Libya’s new leaders were unequal to the task of unifying the country, and that the elections Mrs. Clinton and President Obama pointed to as proof of success only deepened Libya’s divisions.

Now Libya, with a population smaller than that of Tennessee, poses an outsize security threat to the region and beyond, calling into question whether the intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of a different kind.

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, where Islamist militants stormed a Radisson hotel in November and killed 20 people.

A growing trade in humans has sent a quarter-million refugees north across the Mediterranean, with hundreds drowning en route. 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.”

On the campaign trail and in relentless congressional investigations, Republican critics have used a singular tragedy, the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attack on the American diplomatic complex in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, as a hammer against the former secretary of state. And while attempts to pin blame on Mrs. Clinton have largely been frustrated, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, has seized on her role in the larger narrative of the Libyan intervention; during a recent debate, he said he feared that “Secretary Clinton is too much into regime change.”

President Obama has called failing to do more in Libya his biggest foreign policy lesson. And Gérard Araud, the French ambassador to the United Nations during the revolution, is deeply troubled by the aftermath of the 2011 intervention: the Islamic State only “300 miles from Europe,” a refugee crisis that “is a human tragedy as well as a political one” and the destabilization of much of West Africa.

“You have to make a moral choice: a blood bath in Benghazi and keeping Qaddafi in power, or what is happening now,” Mr. Araud said. “It is a tough question, because now Western national interests are very much impacted by what is happening in Libya.”

Rebel volunteers in Benghazi, Libya, 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.


A NEW WAR

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 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 mtg 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.

More decisive for Mrs. Clinton were two episodes from her husband’s presidency — the American failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the success, albeit belated, in bringing together an international military coalition to prevent greater bloodshed after 8,000 Muslims were massacred in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war.

“The thing about Rwanda that’s important is it showed the cost of inaction,” said James B. Steinberg, who served as Mrs. Clinton’s deputy through July 2011. “But I think the reason Bosnia and Kosovo figured so importantly is they demonstrated there were ways of being effective and there were lessons of what worked and didn’t work.”


‘WE WILL BE LEFT BEHIND’

On the same March afternoon when Ambassador Rice was telling her French colleague at the United Nations to back off, President Obama and his security cabinet were arrayed in the White House situation room. Speaking on the video screen from Cairo was Secretary Clinton, just arrived from Paris.

The day before, at lunch with President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, she “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.

But now Mrs. Clinton did not directly push Mr. Obama to intervene in Libya. Nor did she make an impassioned moral case, according to several people in the room.

Instead, she described Mr. Jibril, the opposition leader, as impressive and reasonable. She conveyed her surprise that Arab leaders not only supported military action but, in some cases, were willing to participate. Mostly, though, she warned that the French and British would go ahead with airstrikes on their own, potentially requiring the United States to step in later if things went badly.

Dennis B. Ross, then a senior Middle East expert at the National Security Council, said he remembered listening to her and thinking, “If she’s advocating, she’s advocating in what I would describe as a fairly clever way.”

He recalled her saying: “‘You don’t see what the mood is here, and how this has a kind of momentum of its own. And we will be left behind, and we’ll be less capable of shaping this.’”

Mrs. Clinton’s account of a unified European-Arab front powerfully influenced Mr. Obama. “Because the president would never have done this thing on our own,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser.

Mr. Gates, among others, thought Mrs. Clinton’s backing decisive. Mr. Obama later told him privately in the Oval Office, he said, that the Libya decision was “51-49.”

“I’ve always thought that Hillary’s support for the broader mission in Libya put the president on the 51 side of the line for a more aggressive approach,” Mr. Gates said. Had the secretaries of state and defense both opposed the war, he and others said, the president’s decision might have been politically impossible.

Having decided to act, Mr. Obama questioned military leaders about the effectiveness of a no-fly zone, the Europeans’ favored military response. When they told him that it could not prevent a massacre, Mr. Obama directed his staff to draft a new, tougher United Nations resolution.

Late that night, Mr. Araud, the French diplomat, was astonished to get a second call from Ms. Rice: The United States would not only support intervention, but wanted United Nations support for more than a no-fly zone. Mr. Araud said the turnabout had so shocked him and his British counterpart that they at first suspected a trick.

There remained only one real obstacle: Russia could block a Security Council resolution with a veto. Mrs. Clinton had done her best to develop a relationship with Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, listening to his tales of tagging polar bears and tracking Siberian tigers.

“Her theory on Putin is, this is a person with some passions — if you get him going on those passions, your capacity to try and deal with him is improved,” one Clinton aide said.

But the relationship remained difficult, and the secretary of state 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.”

“We don’t want another war,” she told Mr. Lavrov, stressing that the mission was limited to protecting civilians.

“I take your point about not seeking another war,” she recalled him responding. “But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get one.”

In the end, Mrs. Clinton would acknowledge that Colonel Qaddafi himself had helped win over the Russians, by giving a fiery speech just before the Security Council vote calling his opponents “the rats” and vowing to hunt them “house by house, alley by alley.”

On March 17, 10 members of the Security Council voted for a resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to protect Libyan civilians. Five countries, including Russia, abstained.

Two days later, Mr. Sarkozy met with Mrs. Clinton and David Cameron, the British prime minister, at the Élysée Palace in Paris to discuss the next move. The French president emphasized that within a day or so, Colonel Qaddafi’s troops would be inside Benghazi, mingling with civilians, making it difficult or impossible to use air power against them.

Then he 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 and create the massacre in Benghazi,” she grumbled to an aide. And the bombing began.

FAILURES OF DIPLOMACY

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. The orders, he was told, had come from “outside the Pentagon,” though aides to both Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton said the offer had never made it to their level. He was baffled by the lack of interest in exploring an option he thought might lead to a less bloody transition.

“The question that stays with me is, why didn’t you spend 72 hours giving peace a chance?” he said.

The answer, at least in part, was that the two sides had started from positions of mutual mistrust.

In the weeks leading up to the intervention, aides to Colonel Qaddafi had reached out to potential intermediaries, including Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who served as NATO commander under Mrs. Clinton’s husband, and Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and longtime Clinton friend. Diplomats representing the United Nations, the African Union and a half-dozen countries discussed the chances, however remote, of a political settlement. Even the Russian multimillionaire who headed the World Chess Federation got involved.

There was “envoy proliferation,” said Mr. Chollet, who monitored such exchanges from the National Security Council.

The Americans did not believe that the Libyans purporting to speak for the leader could actually deliver a peaceful transfer of power. Colonel Qaddafi, the Americans thought, would simply use a cease-fire as an opportunity to regroup.

“My view is that there was never a serious offer from Qaddafi to step down from power,” said Gene A. Cretz, who preceded Mr. Stevens as the American ambassador in Libya. “I firmly believe that none of those characters around him ever had the gumption to raise the issue with him personally.”

For the Libyan leader and his inner circle, episodes like the one Admiral Kubic described were proof that the Americans had no desire to negotiate, said Mohamed Ismail, a top aide to Colonel Qaddafi’s son Seif and frequent envoy to the West. “They just wanted to get rid of Qaddafi,” he said.

The Libyans saw the threatened intervention not as a noble act to save lives, as Mrs. Clinton portrayed it, but in far darker terms. After all, Colonel Qaddafi, fearing the fate of Saddam Hussein, had abandoned his nuclear program and was sharing intelligence with the C.I.A. in the fight against Al Qaeda. Mrs. Clinton herself had publicly welcomed one of the leader’s sons to the State Department in 2009.

Now Colonel Qaddafi saw deep treachery, ingratitude and mercantile revenge. He railed to anyone who would listen that he was Libya’s only bulwark against extremism, that without him the country would become a terrorist haven.

In a further complication, the United Nations Security Council had recently voted to refer the attacks on protesters to the International Criminal Court, so both the leader and his inner circle might face prosecution if he ceded power.

“We were open to power sharing, but the minute that happened it was hard to go forward,” Mr. Ismail said. A top American diplomat agreed, saying that the threat of prosecution “boxed Seif into a corner.”

Over the years, Mr. Ismail noted, Colonel Qaddafi had certainly found ways to offend nearly every country now allied against him. He had financed political opponents and been accused of plotting the murder of the Saudi king. And, Mr. Ismail said, he had recently reneged on oil and arms deals with the British and the French.

Then there was Lebanon and the matter of the missing Shiite cleric.

Back in 1978, a revered Lebanese imam, Moussa al-Sadr, had disappeared while visiting Libya. Lebanon suspected foul play, probably with government involvement. But the mystery had never been definitively solved.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Ismail confirmed the Lebanese suspicions. “We said he left to go to Italy,” Mr. Ismail said of Mr. Sadr. But that was a lie.

“He was killed,” Mr. Ismail said, offering a chillingly succinct explanation: “There was an argument with the leader.”

Mr. Ismail said he had learned of the cleric’s fate long after the fact, and stressed that Colonel Qaddafi’s family, including a son now imprisoned in Lebanon, had no involvement or knowledge.

The cleric’s body, he said, was thrown into the sea.

Colonel Qaddafi on March 2, 2011. Before being overthrown, he said that without him Libya would become a terrorist haven.

THE MISSION SHIFTS

Early on, President Obama had declared that Colonel Qaddafi had lost his legitimacy and had to go. But the president was careful to point out that this was the administration’s political position, not its military objective.

“We are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal, specifically the protection of civilians in Libya,” he said. Mrs. Clinton echoed that five days after the Security Council resolution was adopted. “There is nothing in there about getting rid of anybody,” she told ABC News.

The president directed the Pentagon to use its unique military capabilities to stop the feared massacre and, within 10 days, turn the operation over to European and Arab allies. An unnamed aide described this approach as “leading from behind,” handing the president’s Republican opponents an enduring talking point. But Mr. Obama was adamant that Libya would not become another protracted American war.

In fact, his limited goal was achieved far faster than planned. “We basically destroyed Qaddafi’s air defenses and stopped the advance of his forces within three days,” recalled Mr. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser.

But the mission quickly evolved from protecting civilians in Benghazi to protecting civilians wherever they were. As the rebellion swelled and bystanders became combatants, the endgame became ever more murky. The United States and its allies were increasingly drawn to one side of the fighting, without extended debate over what that shift portended.

“I can’t recall any specific decision that said, ‘Well, let’s just take him out,’” Mr. Gates said. Publicly, he said, “the fiction was maintained” that the goal was limited to disabling Colonel Qaddafi’s command and control. In fact, the former defense secretary said, “I don’t think there was a day that passed that people didn’t hope he would be in one of those command and control centers.”

Two of Mrs. Clinton’s top Libya advisers said in interviews that they had harbored misgivings about the intervention precisely because of fears that the coalition would not be able to stop short of regime change, with no ability to manage the aftermath.

One was Mr. Gordon, the assistant secretary. The other was Jeremy Shapiro, who handled Libya on Mrs. Clinton’s policy planning staff.

Mr. Shapiro said he had expressed his concerns to Mrs. Clinton’s top policy aide, Mr. Sullivan. “Once you get into a fight where we basically say, ‘We have to stop a madman from killing tens of thousands of people in his own country,’ how do you stop?” Mr. Shapiro said.

“Ultimately the logic becomes, Jesus, the Qaddafi regime is a real threat to civilians,” he added. “It required nothing to escalate to that. It would have required an amazing force of will not to.”

Practical military considerations also complicated Mr. Obama’s in-and-out strategy. Though he had directed that the United States provide only unique capabilities that its allies did not possess, that turned out to be quite a bit: a continuing supply of precision munitions, combat search and rescue, and surveillance, Mr. Petraeus said.

By April, the president had authorized the use of drones, and, according to a senior rebel commander, C.I.A. operatives began visiting rebel camps and “providing us with intercepts of Qaddafi’s troop movements.”

The incremental escalation ran against Mr. Obama’s instincts, and he did it reluctantly, said Mr. Ross, the former National Security Council official. Mrs. Clinton, he said, was less concerned that “every step puts you on a slippery slope.”

“Her view is, we can’t fail in this,” Mr. Ross said. “Once we have made a decision, we can’t fail.”

A makeshift bomb in a rebel fighter’s hand in Brega, Libya, in 2011. American intelligence officials were worried about what would become of the country if Colonel Qaddafi lost control of it.

ARMING THE REBELS

When Mr. Jibril and his Libyan entourage showed up in Rome in May to meet with Mrs. Clinton, they expected a 10-minute check-in. Instead, they talked for nearly an hour.

The opposition leaders had already given her a white paper setting out a spectacular future: Political parties would compete in open elections, a free news media would hold leaders accountable and women’s rights would be respected.

In retrospect, Mr. Jibril acknowledged in an interview, it was a “utopian ideal” quite detached from Libyan reality. But Mrs. Clinton had been enthusiastic, according to those in attendance, and now she wanted to talk in greater depth about how to turn the vision into reality.

“She said, and I remember this, ‘Let us brainstorm about Libya,’” said Mahmud Shammam, the rebel council’s chief spokesman.

The opposition leaders wanted something more immediate. They wanted weapons.

Despite hundreds of coalition airstrikes, the fighting was at a stalemate. Every time the rebels gained some ground, government forces retook it. The rebels seemed unable to get past Brega, an oil port on the way to Tripoli, and they hoped more sophisticated weapons from the Americans would tip the balance.

The secretary of state heard them out. She “was very patient, very charming,” Mr. Shammam said. “Always had a smile.” In the end, though, she demurred.

But back in Washington, where a low-grade panic over the stalled fighting was setting in, Mrs. Clinton pressed the rebels’ case, according to three senior White House officials and two State Department officials involved in the secret debate.

The American military involvement that Mr. Obama had hoped to curtail after 10 days had dragged on for months, and political support was waning. Some members of Congress were outraged over the administration’s failure to seek approval after 60 days, as the War Powers Act seemed to require.

Onetime advocates of the intervention, including Ms. Slaughter, the secretary’s former policy planning director, had grown disillusioned over the rebels’ human-rights abuses.

“We did not try to protect civilians on Qaddafi’s side,” said Ms. Slaughter, who at the time called for a deal in which Colonel Qaddafi would have turned over power to one of his sons.

The international coalition that Mrs. Clinton had stitched together was also unraveling. Russia accused the United States and its allies of a bait-and-switch, and the Arab League called for a cease-fire and settlement.

“Regime change — that was not our business at all,” Amr Moussa, who headed the organization at the time, said in an interview.

“There was a moment, around about June or July,” recalled Mr. Shapiro, the State Department’s Libya policy adviser, “when the situation on the ground seemed to settle into a stalemate and we weren’t sure we were winning, or at least winning quickly enough.”

Moreover, the United States’ strategy of letting other countries arm the opposition was backfiring, creating a regional power imbalance that could come back to haunt Libya if the rebels did win.

Throughout the spring, the administration had effectively turned a blind eye as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates supplied the rebels with lethal assistance, according to Mr. Gates and others. But Mrs. Clinton had grown increasingly concerned that Qatar, in particular, was sending arms only to certain rebel factions: militias from the city of Misurata and select Islamist brigades.

She could hardly tell Qatar to stand down if the United States was unwilling to step in with lethal assistance of its own, one State Department aide said, “because their answer would be, ‘Well, those guys need help — you’re not doing it.’” Her view, often relayed to her staff, was that to have influence with the fractious opposition and Arab allies, you had to have “skin in the game,” Mr. Ross said.

Former President Bill Clinton had publicly noted in April 2011 that the United States should “not rule out” arming the opposition, and in emails with Mr. Sullivan, her policy adviser, Mrs. Clinton discussed using private contractors to do just that. Mr. Ross, speaking generally, said she had frequently consulted her husband: “I’d say, ‘Here’s what I think we should do.’ She’d say, ‘That’s what Bill said, too.’”

Now Mrs. Clinton took what one top adviser called “the activist side” of the debate over whether to counter Qatar by arming more secular fighters.

“If you didn’t,” Mr. Ross recalled her arguing, “whatever happened, your options would shrink, your influence would shrink, therefore your ability to affect anything there would also shrink.”

But other senior officials were wary. NATO’s supreme allied commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis, had told Congress of “flickers” of Al Qaeda within the opposition. Mr. Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, argued that the administration could not ensure that weapons intended for “the so-called good guys,” as one State Department official put it, did not fall into the hands of Islamist extremists.

In fact, there was reason to worry. Mr. Jibril himself described in an interview how a French shipment of missiles and machine guns had gone awry. At a June meeting, President Sarkozy had agreed to “ask our Arab friends” to supply the Transitional National Council with the weapons, Mr. Jibril said. But, he said, the acting defense minister diverted them to a militia led by Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a militant Islamist who had once been held in a secret prison by the C.I.A.

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.”

Prompted in part by the decision to arm the rebels, the State Department recognized the Transitional National Council as the “legitimate governing authority for Libya.” Mrs. Clinton announced the decision on July 15 in Istanbul.

“That very day, our troops had started to get inside Brega,” Mr. Shammam recalled. “We told that to Mrs. Clinton, and she said — I remember her smiling — ‘Good! This is the only language that Qaddafi is understanding.’”


‘QADDAFI’S DAYS ARE NUMBERED’

One month later, Secretary Clinton appeared at the National Defense University with Leon E. Panetta, who had recently replaced Mr. Gates as defense secretary. She hailed the intervention as a case study in “smart power.”

“For the first time we have a NATO-Arab alliance taking action, you’ve got Arab countries who are running strike actions,” she said. “This is exactly the kind of world that I want to see where it’s not just the United States and everybody is standing on the sidelines while we bear the cost, while we bear the sacrifice.”

Mr. Panetta spoke of a “sense that Qaddafi’s days are numbered.” Six days later, on Aug. 22, the cumulative efforts of the international coalition bore fruit when exuberant rebels stormed the Qaddafi compound in Tripoli. The dictator was still at large, but his reign was over.

Mrs. Clinton’s old friend and political adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, who regularly emailed her political advice and vaguely sourced intelligence reports on Libya, urged her to capitalize on the dictator’s fall.

“Brava!” Mr. Blumenthal exclaimed. As always, he was thinking about Mrs. Clinton’s presidential ambitions. “You must go on camera. You must establish yourself in the historical record at this moment.” She should be sure to use the phrase “successful strategy,” he wrote. “You are vindicated.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us...y-clinton.html

A New Libya, With ‘Very Little Time Left’

The fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi seemed to vindicate Hillary Clinton. Then militias refused to disarm, neighbors fanned a civil war, and the Islamic State found refuge.

By SCOTT SHANE and JO BECKER (FEB. 27, 2016)

It was a grisly start to the new era for Libya, broadcast around the world. The dictator was dragged from the sewer pipe where he was hiding, tossed around by frenzied rebel soldiers, beaten bloody and sodomized with a bayonet. A shaky cellphone video showed the pocked face of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “the Leader” who had terrified Libyans for four decades, looking frightened and bewildered. He would soon be dead.

The first news reports of Colonel Qaddafi’s capture and killing in October 2011 reached the secretary of state in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she had just sat down for a televised interview. “Wow!” she said, looking at an aide’s BlackBerry before cautiously noting that the report had not yet been confirmed. But Hillary Clinton seemed impatient for a conclusion to the multinational military intervention she had done so much to organize, and in a rare unguarded moment, she dropped her reserve.

“We came, we saw, he died!” she exclaimed.

Two days before, Mrs. Clinton had taken a triumphal tour of the Libyan capital, Tripoli, and for weeks top aides had been circulating a “ticktock” that described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment. The timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs. Clinton’s “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from start to finish.” The memo’s language put her at the center of everything: “HRC announces … HRC directs … HRC travels … HRC engages,” it read.

The Libya Gamble

An examination of the American intervention in Libya and Hillary Clinton’s role in it.

It was a brag sheet for a cabinet member eyeing a presidential race, and the Clinton team’s eagerness to claim credit for her prompted eye-rolling at the White House and the Pentagon. Some joked that to hear her aides tell it, she had practically called in the airstrikes herself.

But there were plenty of signs that the triumph would be short-lived, that the vacuum left by Colonel Qaddafi’s death invited violence and division.

In fact, on the same August day that Mr. Sullivan had compiled his laudatory memo, the State Department’s top Middle East hand, Jeffrey D. Feltman, had sent a lengthy email with an utterly different tone about what he had seen on his own visit to Libya.

The country’s interim leaders seemed shockingly disengaged, he wrote. Mahmoud Jibril, the acting prime minister, who had helped persuade Mrs. Clinton to back the opposition, was commuting from Qatar, making only “cameo” appearances. A leading rebel general had been assassinated, underscoring the hazard of “revenge killings.” Islamists were moving aggressively to seize power, and members of the anti-Qaddafi coalition, notably Qatar, were financing them.

On a task of the utmost urgency, disarming the militia fighters who had dethroned the dictator but now threatened the nation’s unity, Mr. Feltman reported an alarming lassitude. Mr. Jibril and his associates, he wrote, “tried to avert their eyes” from the problem that militias could pose on “the Day After.”

In short, the well-intentioned men who now nominally ran Libya were relying on “luck, tribal discipline and the ‘gentle character’ of the Libyan people” for a peaceful future. “We will continue to push on this,” he wrote.

In the ensuing months, Mr. Feltman’s memo would prove hauntingly prescient. But Libya’s Western allies, preoccupied by domestic politics and the crisis in Syria, would soon relegate the country to the back burner.

And Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.

“Nobody will say it’s too late. No one wants to say it,” said Mahmud Shammam, who served as chief spokesman for the interim government. “But I’m afraid there is very little time left for Libya.”


‘WHAT ELSE CAN YOU DO?’

Media reports referred to Mrs. Clinton’s one brief visit to Libya in October 2011 as a “victory lap,” but the declaration was decidedly premature. Security precautions were extraordinary, with ships positioned off the coast in case an emergency evacuation was needed. As it turned out, there was no violence. But the wild celebratory scenes in the Libyan capital that day actually highlighted the divisions in the new order.

At a hospital, a university and government offices, Mrs. Clinton posed for photos with the Western-educated interim leaders and hailed the promise of democracy.

“I am proud to stand here on the soil of a free Libya,” she declared, standing alongside a beaming Mr. Jibril. “It is a great privilege to see a new future for Libya being born. And indeed, the work ahead is quite challenging, but the Libyan people have demonstrated the resolve and resilience necessary to achieve their goals.”

But everywhere Mrs. Clinton went, there was the other face of the rebellion. Crowds of Kalashnikov-toting fighters — the thuwar, or revolutionaries, as they called themselves — mobbed her motorcade and pushed to glimpse the American celebrity. Mostly they cheered, and Mrs. Clinton remained poised and unrattled, but her security detail watched the pandemonium with white-knuckled concern.

At the University of Tripoli, students were trampling wall hangings of Colonel Qaddafi that had been pulled to the ground, recalled Harold Koh, the State Department’s top lawyer, who had flown in with Mrs. Clinton on an American military aircraft. One grateful student pointed out the gallows where anti-Qaddafi protesters had been hanged, while others wondered what the United States might do to help win the peace.

“We know what the U.S. can do with bombs,” one student told Mr. Koh. “What else can you do?”

When Mrs. Clinton’s entourage finally departed, Gene A. Cretz, the American ambassador, wrote a relieved email to Cheryl Mills, the secretary of state’s chief of staff. The visit, he wrote, had been “picture perfect given the chaos we labor under in Libya.”

Mrs. Clinton certainly understood how hard the transition to a post-Qaddafi Libya would be. In February, before the allied bombing began, she noted that political change in Egypt had proved tumultuous despite strong institutions.

"So imagine how difficult it will be in a country like Libya,” she had said. “Qaddafi ruled for 42 years by basically destroying all institutions and never even creating an army, so that it could not be used against him.”

Early on, the president’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, had created a planning group called “Post-Q.” Mrs. Clinton helped organize the Libya Contact Group, a powerhouse collection of countries that had pledged to work for a stable and prosperous future. By early 2012, she had flown to a dozen international meetings on Libya, part of a grueling schedule of official travel in which she kept competitive track of miles traveled and countries visited.

Dennis B. Ross, a veteran Middle East expert at the National Security Council, had argued unsuccessfully for an outside peacekeeping force. But with oil beginning to flow again from Libyan wells, he was pleasantly surprised by how things seemed to be going.

“I had unease that there wasn’t more being done more quickly to create cohesive security forces,” Mr. Ross said. “But the last six months of 2011, there was a fair amount of optimism.”

Even so, the gulf separating the suave English speakers of the interim government from the thuwar was becoming more and more pronounced.

After decades in exile, some leaders were more familiar with American and European universities than with Libyan tribes and the militias that had sprung from them. Others, like Mr. Jibril, were suspect in some quarters because of previous roles in the Qaddafi regime. It was increasingly evident that the ragtag populist army that had actually done the fighting against Colonel Qaddafi was not taking orders from the men in suits who believed they were Libya’s new leaders.

“It should have been clear to anyone,” said Mohammed Ali Abdallah, an opposition member who now heads a leading political party, “that there were clear contradictions in the makeup of the opposition and that unity could not last.”

Jeremy Shapiro, who handled Libya on Mrs. Clinton’s policy staff, said the administration was looking for “the unifier — the Nelson Mandela.” He added: “That was why Jibril was so attractive. We were always saying, ‘This is the guy who can appeal to all the factions.’ What we should have been looking for — but we were never good at playing that game — is a power balance.”

Under the circumstances, Libya’s push for elections by July 2012, nine months after Colonel Qaddafi’s death, appeared to some to be premature. But the schedule fulfilled the opposition’s promises to the West and had the backing of competing factions.

“Suddenly you had people who belonged to political parties,” said Abdurrazag Mukhtar, a member of the interim government who lived in California for many years and is now Libya’s ambassador to Turkey. “The Muslim Brotherhood. Jibril. All these guys thinking, ‘Time for an election.’”

“But we were not ready,” he said. “You needed a road map for security first.”


‘FIERCE LIMITS’

By January 2012, there was an unmistakable drumbeat of trouble.

His popularity sagging, Mr. Jibril had stepped down as transitional prime minister. A prominent Muslim scholar had accused him of guiding the nation toward a “new era of tyranny and dictatorship.” In a deal struck between two powerful militias, he was replaced by Abdurrahim el-Keib, an engineering professor who had taught for years at the University of Alabama.

On Jan. 5, Mrs. Clinton’s old friend and adviser Sidney Blumenthal emailed her with the latest in a series of behind-the-scenes reports on Libya, largely written by a retired C.I.A. officer, Tyler Drumheller, who died last year.

The memo detailed the roiling tensions between Islamists and secularists over the role of Islamic law, fighting between rival militias associated with two different towns and four visits to Mr. Keib’s office by “angry militiamen” demanding concessions.

Mr. Keib, the email said, “believes that if he does not disarm the militias and meet their demands in the next six months, there is a good chance of increased fighting among rival groups that could lead to civil war.” Mrs. Clinton forwarded the message to Mr. Sullivan, her policy aide, with a single comment: “Worrying.”

Such alarming reports might have been expected to spur action in Washington. They did not.

After Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, with minimal violence and friendly interim leadership, Libya had moved quickly off the top of the administration’s agenda. The regular situation room meetings on Libya, often including the president, simply stopped. The revolt in Syria, in the heart of the Middle East and with nearly four times Libya’s population, took center stage.

Libya, Mr. Ross said, “was farmed out to the working level.”

The inattention was not just neglect. It was policy.

“The president was like, ‘We are not looking to do another Iraq,’” said Derek Chollet, then handling Libya for the National Security Council. “And by the way, the Europeans were all along saying: ‘No, no, no, we’re doing this. We got it. We believe in Libya. This is in our neighborhood.’”

So the president and the National Security Council set what one official called “fierce limits” on the American role: The United States would provide help only when it could offer a unique capability, only when Libya explicitly requested the services and only when Libya paid for them with its oil revenue. In practice, those conditions meant the United States would do very little.

And though the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, visited Libya together, they, too, were soon distracted, by re-election campaigns and economic worries.

The neglect was made easier by the Libyans themselves. Displaying both naïveté and nationalism, the interim leaders insisted, at least in public, that they wanted no outside interference. They were so wary of foreign troops that they refused to let the United Nations maintain a basic security force to protect its compound.

“They were very keen to take responsibility for their country,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And we were very keen to let them, for our own reasons. So there was a sort of conspiracy there.”

As the months passed and the factional fighting grew worse, Mrs. Clinton pressed for the administration to do more, asking the Pentagon, for example, to help train security forces. But she was boxed in by the president’s strictures and the Libyans’ resistance.

“It’s like you’re twisting yourself into a pretzel to try to say, ‘O.K., we won’t have boots on the ground, but we know we got to do something,’” Mr. Ross said.

Even modest proposals foundered. When Mrs. Clinton proposed sending a hospital ship to treat wounded Libyan fighters, the National Security Council rejected the idea, aides said.

But whatever her misgivings, Mrs. Clinton prized her relationship with the president and respected his authority to set policy. So she went along, as disciplined as ever.

‘LOST FROM THE BEGINNING’

Andrew Shapiro was trying to make the best of a bad situation. He had to explain what the United States was doing to secure the vast military arsenal that Colonel Qaddafi had left behind — a notable exception to the hands-off policy.

Speaking in Washington in February 2012, Mr. Shapiro, the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, described efforts to “galvanize an international response” to find and destroy arms caches. But he acknowledged that the $40 million program Mrs. Clinton had announced was not going as well as hoped, even when it came to the most worrisome weapons, the Manpads, shoulder-fired missiles capable of shooting down an airliner.

“How many are still missing? The frank answer is we don’t know and probably never will,” Mr. Shapiro said. “We cannot rule out that some weapons may have leaked out of Libya.”

The covert coals-to-Newcastle effort to arm the rebels during the revolution was the least of it. The dictator had stashed an astonishing quantity of weapons in the desert.

“We knew he had a lot, but he had 10 times that,” said Jean-David Levitte, then a top aide to Mr. Sarkozy.

While the C.I.A. moved quickly to secure Colonel Qaddafi’s chemical weapons, other efforts fell short. “There was one arsenal that we thought had 20,000 shoulder-fired, surface-to-air missiles, SA-7s, that basically just disappeared into the maw of the Middle East and North Africa,” recalled Robert M. Gates, the American defense secretary at the time.

A major stumbling block was that the Obama administration was negotiating with interim Libyan ministers as if they represented a unified government. In fact, they were often rivals, jockeying for power in advance of the elections.

“I know this sounds incredible, but for months and months and months on end we could not get anyone in authority in the government to just sign an agreement on anything, including our detailed offers of security assistance,” said Antony J. Blinken, then the top security aide to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “There was total paralysis.”

When it came to securing weapons, the Americans’ initial idea — to give the interim government assistance to buy them back itself — foundered when the Libyan ministers failed to carry out the program, several Libyan officials said.

So the State Department, working with the C.I.A., was left to try to strike its own deals with the militias. But there was little incentive to sell. As Mr. Shammam, the former spokesman for the interim government, put it: “How are you going to buy a Kalashnikov for $1,000? With a Kalashnikov, someone can make $1,000 a day kidnapping people.”


Where Weapons From Libya Have Been Found

Weapons have been trafficked out of Libya since 2011, especially through the country’s remote areas in the south. Many have turned up in regional conflict areas as far as Mali and Syria.

Worse, the program created an incentive for militias to import weapons to sell to the Americans, said Ali Zeidan, an adviser to the interim government who would inherit the problem in November 2012 when he became prime minister.

“If you want to buy weapons, you have to control the border,” Mr. Zeidan said, adding that the failure to do that led fighters to “sell them, get more and sell them again.”

Asked by a reporter that spring why it was so difficult for the United States to “get it right” when it intervened in the Middle East, Mrs. Clinton was still holding up Libya as a model of success. “I would take issue with the premise of that question,” said Mrs. Clinton, who declined to be interviewed for these articles.

But she was well aware of the deteriorating security situation.

In a February 2012 report, Amnesty International had called Libya’s militias “out of control.” The same month, Mr. Cretz, the American ambassador, warned in an email that the July elections would take place “in the context of militia control.”

“Continuing rivalries among the militias remain dangerous from the perspective of the havoc they can wreak with their firepower,” he wrote to Mrs. Clinton’s policy adviser, Mr. Sullivan, who sent it on to her.

In Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle, the boasting about her achievements in Libya had given way to a “nagging worry that it would go south,” one senior aide said. The aide recalled being instructed jokingly by Mr. Sullivan “to make sure that didn’t happen” before the American presidential election in November.

So when Libyans went to the polls on July 7, in what international observers characterized as a fair election with high turnout and little violence, Mrs. Clinton and other advocates of the intervention were relieved. In the wake of the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, voters had chosen Islamist-led governments. But in Libya, the winning coalition consisted of Western-friendly political parties led by Mr. Jibril.

The next month, with crowds in Tripoli chanting that the “blood of the martyrs will not be wasted,” power was handed over to the newly elected General National Congress, the first peaceful transition in Libya’s history.

Mrs. Clinton, who one aide said privately shared the worry that the country was not ready for elections, nevertheless congratulated the Libyans on “this historic milestone.”

“Now the hard work really begins to build an effective, transparent government that unifies the country,” she said.

But unity was already impossible.

“In a sense it was lost from the beginning,” said Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the United States and an early advocate of the intervention. “It was the same mistake you made in Iraq. You organize elections in a country with no experience of compromise or political parties. So you have an election, and you think that everything is solved. But eventually tribal realities come back to haunt the country.”

‘VERY SIMPLE DREAMS’

While the Americans struggled against weapons proliferation and hoped for the best, a former rebel officer took on the problem at the core of Libya’s predicament: disbanding the volatile forces that had ousted Colonel Qaddafi and helping the fighters find a place in a peaceful new Libya. The officer, M. Mustafa El Sagezli, would never meet Mrs. Clinton. But the outcome of his lonely campaign would decide to a considerable degree Libya's place in her record as secretary of state.

As deputy commander of the February 17 Martyrs Brigade, one of the largest and most capable rebel militias, Mr. Sagezli had tried his best to look after his recruits. It was, he felt, an obligation that did not end with the revolution.

Shortly after Colonel Qaddafi was killed, Mr. Sagezli had gathered a group of fighters in Benghazi. A businessman with degrees from Utah State University and the London School of Economics, he knew the rebel militias had been organized along Libya’s deepest fault lines: tribal divisions, regional loyalties and differing stances on Islam’s proper role. Yet the country could not progress unless the militias were reintegrated into civil society and replaced by a regular army.

“What do you need?” he asked the fighters. “What are your dreams?”

Their modest answers surprised and encouraged him.

“Some were very simple dreams,” he said. “‘Help us get married.’ Some wanted a scholarship.”

The transitional government soon set up a Warriors Affairs Commission, headed by Mr. Sagezli. Many of the 162,000 former fighters it registered were illiterate and needed education. Some wanted to join a police force or a new army, but nearly half hoped to start small businesses.

Mr. Sagezli said he had taken a proposal to the transitional government: The Labor Ministry could help would-be businessmen, the Interior Ministry could train customs and police officers, the Defense Ministry would absorb others into a national army, and so on.

It was ambitious, but the government had plenty of money; Mrs. Clinton had worked hard to free up billions of dollars in Libyan assets that had been frozen by anti-Qaddafi sanctions. Her view, said one top aide, was that if the interim government “couldn’t rule by force, let them rule by finance.”

But instead of giving priority to demobilizing the militias, as an aide said Mrs. Clinton had hoped, the transitional regime simply began paying fighters salaries that many viewed as protection money. In one illustrative incident in May 2012, Kikla militiamen stormed the office of Mr. Keib, the interim prime minister, demanding back pay as gunfire filled the air.


[A militia group that had taken part in the Libyan revolution paying its members in March 2012. The money intended to help former fighters ended up strengthening the militias.]


“Don’t give them salaries for nothing,” Mr. Sagezli recalls begging. “Giving a commander money means giving strength to the militias, more loyalty for the commander, more armaments and more corruption. They never listened.” Instead, he said, “the politicians started bribing them to buy loyalty.”

With the July elections, precedent became political imperative.

In the run-up to the vote, a powerful militia shut down roads to press its demand that its eastern Libyan region have a greater say when the incoming Parliament drafted a constitution. The authorities capitulated, leaving the writing of the constitution for a second assembly to be elected later, with more seats from the east.

That, in turn, made it harder to disarm the militias, since each faction and town knew its weapons might be needed to protect its interests in the constitutional process. That was how the game would be played.

Mr. Zeidan, who became prime minister in November 2012, financed a few of Mr. Sagezli’s programs. But he continued to pay off militia leaders. Political parties aligned themselves with various commanders, and with no army or police force to carry out their will, the elected officials became increasingly dependent on the fighters extorting them.

Haig Melkessetian, a former American intelligence operative whose company provided security for European embassies in Libya, described militia rule as “anarchy — there’s just no other word for it.”

“We had to have five or six IDs to be able to pass, depending on the street,” he said.

Assassinations and “the worst kind of vigilantism” became commonplace, said Sarah Leah Whitson, who was tracking abuses in Libya for Human Rights Watch. One militia leader told her, “The G.N.C. may have had electoral legitimacy, but we have revolutionary legitimacy.”

Mr. Sagezli said he had discussed the difficulties with United Nations representatives and with the new American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens. “I kept asking them for support,” he recalled.

But if there was any pressure from American or European officials to stop the government payoffs, he said, “it wasn’t loud enough.”


‘THEY CREATED THE MONSTERS’

The American ambassador was hearing it from both sides.

Officials from Libya’s moderate governing coalition were demanding that the United States stop the wealthy nation of Qatar from sending money and arms to militias aligned with Libya’s Islamist political bloc. The Islamists, in turn, were accusing a rival gulf power, the United Arab Emirates, of providing similar patronage to fighters aligned with their political enemies.

The shipments violated a United Nations arms embargo. But Mr. Stevens told Mr. Abdallah, the Libyan party chief, that when he raised the issue with his Qatari and Emirati counterparts, he was met either with outright denials or with protestations that the shipments had gone through blessed official channels, namely government ministers aligned with various factions.

“When I go to the U.A.E., they say, ‘I’m dealing with the minister of defense — how much more official can I get?’” Mr. Abdallah recalled the ambassador saying.

It was bad enough that Libya’s elected officials lacked the will to force militias to lay down the arms they already possessed. Now, with Libya veering toward civil war, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — waging a broader war for influence throughout the region — were providing opposing militia commanders with back-channel resupply routes.

In Washington, though, it was the Islamists’ patrons, the Qataris, who were of paramount concern.

During the 2011 Libyan revolution, Mrs. Clinton had successfully pushed the administration to take a direct role in arming opposition groups, hoping that would persuade the Qataris to stop sending weapons to extremist rebel factions. Though that clearly had not worked, she explored a similar play as she wrangled with what to do about “the Qatar problem” in 2012, aides said.

Mrs. Clinton was already pushing for an aggressive American program to arm and train Syrian rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad. What if she could secure what one top aide called a “bank shot” deal in which the United States would provide assistance to certain of Qatar’s allies in Syria in return for Qatar’s dropping its support for Islamist militias in Libya?

But Mrs. Clinton’s activist streak ran up against President Obama’s deep wariness of further entanglement in the Middle East, and she lost the debate on arming the Syrian opposition. With no carrot to offer the Qataris, she asked aides to prepare a memo on how the United States might wield a stick.

Mrs. Clinton typically relied heavily on a tiny circle of close advisers. But facing a thorny problem, she sometimes convened a larger group, 15 or more aides, in her outer office, where her long sofa sat beneath a window with a view of the Lincoln Memorial.

“She really liked to get people to think through the what-if pieces — what if we do this, what are the consequences of doing that, and exploring alternatives,” said James B. Steinberg, her deputy secretary of state.

Some advisers suggested trimming military aid to Qatar or threatening to move American military assets elsewhere in the region. But Middle East hands at the State Department pushed back, saying that pressuring the gulf monarchy would only backfire. And the Defense Department strongly objected: It had a 20-year history of close cooperation with Qatar, which hosted critical American military bases.

In the end, there was no appetite for anything beyond quiet diplomacy. “We didn’t do nearly enough,” said Mr. Ross, who also explored ways to “raise the price” on Qatar, to no avail.

Only last year did President Obama rebuke the nations meddling in Libya, and by then it was too late.

“They created the monsters we are dealing with today,” Mr. Abdallah said, “which is these militias that are so empowered they will never subordinate themselves to any government.”


‘THINGS COULD NOT GO RIGHT’

On Aug. 8, 2012, a month after the elections, Mr. Stevens, the American ambassador, signed off on a cable sent to Washington titled "The Guns of August,” playing on the title of a classic history of the first days of World War I. It described Benghazi as moving “from trepidation to euphoria and back as a series of violent incidents has dominated the political landscape” and warned of “a security vacuum.”

No American official knew Libya better. He would pay with his life for his determination to see Libya’s tumultuous reality up close. A month after the cable was sent, Islamist extremists attacked the United States mission in Benghazi, and Mr. Stevens was one of four Americans killed.
In the assaults on the diplomatic compound and nearby C.I.A. annex, the most worrisome trends in the country came together: the feeble central government, the breakdown of law and order, the rise of militants and the months of minimal attention from Washington. Republicans quickly seized on the episode for what would become years of inquiries, hearings and fund-raising focused on Mrs. Clinton.

Still, in her last months at the State Department, Mrs. Clinton rode a wave of popularity, bolstered by an Internet meme called “Texts From Hillary.” Its emblem was a photograph of the secretary of state gazing through dark glasses at her BlackBerry. Few knew that it had been taken aboard the military transport plane taking her to Libya in those heady days after the dictator’s fall.

If the attempt to pin blame for the Benghazi attack on Mrs. Clinton would largely fail, the notion that the Libyan intervention was among her successes had become steadily more threadbare. Libya would not conform, either as cudgel or brag, to the needs of American politics.

As she exited the State Department in February 2013, factional violence, which would break into open civil war in 2014, was on the rise. The flow of refugees paying smugglers for a hazardous trip across the Mediterranean was swelling. And the Libyan chaos would give rise to two rival governments — one backed by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, the other by Qatar, Turkey and Sudan — providing sanctuary to extremists, soon to be joined by emissaries of the Islamic State.

The weapons that had made it so hard to stabilize Libya were turning up in Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt and Gaza, often in the hands of terrorists, insurgents or criminals.

In the fall of 2012, American intelligence agencies produced a classified assessment of the proliferation of arms from Libya. “It was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” said Michael T. Flynn, then head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “We’ve not had that kind of proliferation of weapons since really the end of the Vietnam War.”

A cynical line would begin to circulate in Washington: In Iraq, the United States had intervened and occupied — and things had gone to hell. In Libya, the United States had intervened but not occupied — and things had gone to hell. And in Syria, the United States had neither intervened nor occupied — and things had still gone to hell.

It was a dark jest designed to shift blame from baffled American policy makers to a troubled region. But it raised a serious question about Libya: If overthrowing a hated dictator in a small and relatively rich country produced such epic troubles, was American intervention ever justified?

“It’s true that things went wrong,” said Mr. Sagezli, of the warriors commission. “But from a Libyan point of view, things could not go right. We had 42 years of Qaddafi’s rule, no infrastructure, a terrible education system, thousands of political prisoners, divisions among tribes, destruction of the army. When you have such a state, when you take out the dictator, it’s like taking the cover off the pot.”

Given that background, Ms. Whitson, who monitored Libya for Human Rights Watch, thought the United States’ failure to follow up was unforgivable.

“If you are going to carry out a military intervention to decapitate the government, you are making a commitment to the stability of that country over the long haul,” she said. “Doing nothing, as we did here? A bunch of eighth graders can agree that is not an approach that is going to work.”

The history that Mrs. Clinton often cited should have been instructive, Ms. Whitson said. “In Bosnia, yes, we intervened. But there’s been peacekeeping troops there for 20 years,” she said.

Strikingly, President Obama said in 2014 that such criticism was just, and that Libya had provided his biggest lesson in foreign policy.

He did not regret the intervention, he told Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist, because without Colonel Qaddafi’s overthrow, “Libya would have been like Syria, right? Because Qaddafi was not going to be able to contain what had been unleashed there.”

But Mr. Obama said the United States and its allies “underestimated the need to come in full force” after the dictator’s fall. The Libyan experience, he said, is “a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question: Should we intervene militarily? Do we have an answer for the day after?”

Libya, aides say, has strongly reinforced the president’s reluctance to move more decisively in Syria. “Literally, this has given him pause about what would be required if you eliminated the Syrian state,” a top adviser said.

Mrs. Clinton, by contrast, pushed for greater American involvement early in the Syrian civil war and has repeatedly called for a no-fly zone, a move Mr. Obama has so far rejected. The lessons of the Libya experience have not tempered her more aggressive approach to international crises.

While remaining political allies, the president and his former top diplomat have taken revealing shots at each other. In a rare flash of emotion after leaving office, Mrs. Clinton derided the president’s guiding principle in foreign relations: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said in a 2014 interview with The Atlantic.


Last fall, frustrated with calls for greater American involvement in Syria, Mr. Obama dismissed them as “half-baked” and “mumbo jumbo.” Asked whether those labels applied to Mrs. Clinton’s proposals, the president denied it, not entirely convincingly.

When asked to defend her record on Libya, Mrs. Clinton has taken a line quite the opposite of her aides’ previous insistence on her central role in the intervention. “At the end of the day, this was the president’s decision,” she told a House committee in October.

She has said the military alliance that overthrew Colonel Qaddafi represented “smart power at its best,” but called Libya “a classic case of a hard choice.” Mostly, she has insisted that history’s judgment on the intervention, and her role in it, are not yet final.

“I think it sometimes shows American impatience,” she said in 2014, “that, ‘O.K., you got rid of this dictator who destroyed institutions. Why aren’t you behaving like a mature democracy?’ That doesn’t happen overnight.”

Yet if, for Mr. Obama, the Libyan experience has underscored doubts about the United States’ power to shape outcomes in other countries, it has demonstrated for Mrs. Clinton just how crucial an American presence can be.

“We have learned the hard way when America is absent, especially from unstable places, there are consequences,” she said at a House hearing on Benghazi in October, articulating what sounded like a guiding principle. “Extremism takes root, aggressors seek to fill the vacuum, and security everywhere is threatened, including here at home.”










http://spartacist.org/english/wv/1094/elections.html


Coming off the Democratic National Convention—where retired four-star Marine general John Allen roused the party faithful into jingoistic chants of “USA! USA!”—Hillary Clinton has been racking up endorsements from a veritable rogues’ gallery of U.S. imperialism’s leading warmongers, mass murderers and Dr. Strangeloves. In early August, 50 former top national security advisors to Republican administrations going back to Richard Nixon signed a letter declaring that their party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump, “would be the most reckless President in American history.” What moved them to jump ship was not Trump’s flagrant racism, a card the GOP has been playing for decades, albeit somewhat more sotto voce.

Rather, these Republicans lost it when Trump opined that he would not necessarily support the Baltic NATO states if Russia attacked. For more than a decade, the U.S. imperialists have been provoking capitalist Russia, including through a military buildup of NATO forces on its borders. Now the Democrats and many Republicans are seizing on Trump’s stated affinity for Vladimir Putin to portray him as a Manchurian candidate, a puppet for the Russian president. In a 5 August New York Times op-ed piece titled “I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton,” Michael Morell, former acting director of the CIA, put it baldly: “In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

In contrast, Morell promotes Clinton’s qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism. He points to her role as an “early advocate of the raid that brought Bin Laden to justice” (i.e., murdered him and threw his body into the sea) and a consistent promoter of a “more aggressive approach” in Syria (i.e., bomb ’em back to the Stone Age). He salutes her willingness to “use force” and “her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all—whether to put young American women and men in harm’s way.” No wonder that she has for months been getting the support of several leading neocons who worry that Trump is an “unreliable” loose cannon. In short, Clinton is a proven, gold-plated war hawk.

Donald Trump is a dangerous demagogue, capable of saying and doing just about anything. And there is plenty for working people and the oppressed to fear as he incites a frenzy of “America First” chauvinist reaction among his supporters, who include the race-terrorists of the KKK and other fascists. It is this fear that the Democrats have cynically played on to get black people, immigrants, workers and the now-dejected youthful followers of Bernie Sanders to rally behind Clinton.

In the Democratic primaries, 77 percent of the black vote went to Clinton. Overwhelmingly, black people see the former party of the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South as the only option to defeat Trump. It was heartbreaking to see the mothers of Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and others killed at the hands of the cops or racist vigilantes on stage at the Democratic Convention for the coronation of a woman who reviled young black men as “superpredators” and backed her husband’s racist anti-crime bill and the destruction of welfare.

As always the labor misleaders offered their services, with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka also taking the stage to push the whopping lie that Clinton will “protect workplace rights” and “stand up to Wall Street.” The union tops’ allegiance to the Democrats is an old shell game. Their subordination of the interests of the working class to the party of their exploiters has left a trail of broken strikes, busted unions and the ongoing destruction of the livelihood of working people.

Meanwhile, as she tries to court Republicans, Clinton’s attentions are directed not to the traditional base of the Democrats but to wooing Wall Street and the generals, spies and other operatives of U.S. imperialism into her “big tent.” And she has been very successful. As Black Agenda Report editor Glen Ford wrote in “Hillary Stuffs Entire U.S. Ruling Class into Her Big, Nasty Tent” (10 August):


“It’s a funky place to be—especially for the traditional Black, brown and labor ‘base’ of the party, now squished into a remote and malodorous corner of the tent, near the latrine, clutching the pages of a party platform that was never meant to bind anyone....

“She is the candidate of the imperial war machine, whose operatives have flocked to her corner in dread of Trump’s willingness to make ‘deals’ with the Russians and Chinese. She is the candidate of multinational corporations, which are perfectly confident she is lying about her stance on TPP and other trade deals. And she is the candidate of the CIA and its fellow global outlaws, who will thrive as never before with a president in the White House who cackles ‘We came, we saw, he died’ when the leader of an African country is murdered by Islamic jihadists supported by the United States.”









http://nationalinterest.org/feature/...disaster-16600

Hillary's Huge Libya Disaster: America has given up in Clinton’s wake. (by Charles R. Kubic) [June 15, 2016]

Prior to the February 17, 2011, “Day of Rage,” Libya had a national budget surplus of 8.7 percent of GDP in 2010, with oil production at 1.8 million barrels per day, on track to reach its goal of 3 million barrels per day. Currently, oil production has decreased by over 80 percent. Following the revolution, the Libyan economy contracted by an estimated 41.8 percent, with a national deficit of 17.1 percent GDP in 2011.

Before the revolution, Libya was a secure, prospering, secular Islamic country and a critical ally providing intelligence on terrorist activity post–September 11, 2001. Qaddafi was no longer a threat to the United States. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly advocated and succeeded in convincing the administration to support the Libyan rebels with a no-fly zone, intended to prevent a possible humanitarian disaster that turned quickly into all-out war.

Within weeks of the revolution there were two valid cease-fire opportunities, one presented to the Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and a second opportunity presented to U.S. Africa Command for direct military commander negotiations to effect Gaddafi’s abdication, in which I was personally involved. Both opportunities were rejected and shut down by Secretary Clinton. Internal communications that went public last year revealed that on March 18, 2011, a colonel in JCS wrote, “. . . Due to the UNSCR, Libyan forces sped up ops to get to Benghazi, and will soon cease fire. As expected. Our contact will arrange a face-to-face meeting with Saif, or a skype/video-telecon to open communications if time does not permit. It will have to be with a high level USG official for him to agree. If there will be an ultimatum before any ops, the USG must be in communication with the right leaders and hopefully listen for any answer. A peaceful solution is still possible that keeps Saif on our side without any bloodshed in Benghazi.” However, on March 14, 2011 Secretary Clinton had already met with rebel leaders in Paris, including Mahmoud Jibril, number two in the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, and had committed to support their revolution.

Despite valid ceasefire opportunities to prevent “bloodshed in Benghazi” at the onset of hostilities, Secretary Clinton intervened and quickly pushed her foreign policy in support of a revolution led by the Muslim Brotherhood and known terrorists in the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. One of the Libyan Rebel Brigade commanders, Ahmed Abu Khattala, would later be involved in the terrorist attack in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Articulating her indifference to the chaos brought by war, Secretary Clinton stated on May 18, 2013, to the House Oversight Committee and the American public, “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night and decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?”

Secretary Clinton’s war actually did make a difference. It led to a very real and very tragic humanitarian disaster. Her bad judgment and failed policy resulted in the arming of terrorists, months of war and tens of thousands of causalities, the murder of the American ambassador and the deaths of three other brave Americans, continued civil war and the collapse of the Libyan economy, and a failed nation-state contributing to a tragic European migrant crisis. Clearly the Libyan disaster tops Secretary Clinton’s legacy of failure.


The revolution ended October 23, 2011, and Libya held its first democratic election on July 7, 2012. A second election was held on June 25, 2014. Despite efforts made by peaceful Libyan officials to establish a strong secular nation, radical Islamic elements rejected the election results and used military force to subvert the will of the Libyan people. As a direct consequence of the chaos caused by Secretary Clinton’s failed policy, there are now four entities competing for control of Libya: (1) the twice-elected democratic secular parliamentary government forced into exile in Tobruk by Islamist attacks, (2) the unelected radical Islamist-controlled government in Tripoli, (3) the savage ISIS terrorists who control the city of Sirte and (4) the UN-imposed Government of National Accord (GNA) recently placed ashore in abandoned buildings in Tripoli. The UN is attempting, with U.S. and European support, to impose a unity government (the GNA) that will include elements of sharia law in a new constitution. This approach was rejected twice by the Libyan people, who wanted a more secular government that is not founded in sharia.

The Libyan National Oil Company (NOC) continues to control limited commercial oil exports from certain oil fields through western ports. The democratically elected government in Tobruk has objected to the continued control of oil exports by the Islamist factions in Tripoli, and has recently established its own capability to export oil from an eastern port. However, to counter the Tobruk government, the UN recently imposed a unilateral embargo on an attempted eastern shipment of 650,000 barrels of oil. The UN embargo was lifted when contested by the UN representative of the elected Libyan government.

More recently the UN, with U.S. support, has threatened to impose travel and financial sanctions on Libyan politicians representing the elected government in Tobruk simply because they are resisting the authority of the UN-imposed GNA. And, in a truly absurd move, the United States is now considering authorizing arms shipments to the UN imposed GNA in Tripoli.

America can no longer continue to support Hillary’s legacy of failure in Libya. The United States needs to support democracy in Libya, not UN sanctions or arms shipments. And the United States should support Libyan efforts to provide internal security, critical to reestablishing full oil production and unimpeded export, in order to revitalize the failing Libyan economy. In doing so, the United States and Libya can together achieve peace—through economic and military strength.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/happy-f...xt-war/5538659

Happy Fifth Anniversary, Hillary Clinton, You’ve Destroyed Libya… We Await Your Next War (By Edward Curtin) [Global Research, July 29, 2016]

Convention confetti raining down on smiling faces should not conceal the bloody truth that trails Hillary Clinton. As the balloons rise to celebrate her triumph, her victims continue to fall.

Following the bidding of her oligarchic backers in the hidden government, she has always been fervently eager to lend her immoral authority to the massacre of foreign peoples and the destruction of their central governments. Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Serbia, etc. – the list is as long as her moral turpitude is deep.

But as the “Queen of Chaos” is crowned and feted in the City of Brotherly Love, it is crucially important that we recall her role five years ago in the destruction of the African country that had the highest living standard on the continent, excellent health care, free education, good social services, etc. – Libya.

As Libya, according to plan, has descended into civil war and chaos (see Iraq, Syria, etc.) as a result of the 2011 “humanitarian intervention” instigated by Clinton and her ilk, it has disappeared from mainstream media propaganda. Out of sight, out of mind. It will reappear in the corporate press if the American/Nato aggressors decide to bomb the country again in alliance with their friend, the Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, probably in support of the CIA-affiliated General Khalifa Haftar, who is presently wreaking havoc in eastern Libya with western support, as leaked tapes have shown. The time for that renewed bombing may be fast approaching, though it might be delayed for political reasons until after the presidential election.

In the popular mind, of course, Clinton is associated with the controversial events of September 2012 in Benghazi that resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. As the Secretary of State, she was no doubt aware of Stevens’ work with the CIA organizing the transfer of the seized Gaddafi government weapons to Turkish ports. As the Italian historian Paolo Sensini writes in his eye-opening book, Sowing Chaos: Libya in the Wake of Humanitarian Intervention, “The arms were then transferred to the jihadi forces engaged in terrorist actions against the government of Syria under Bashar al-Assad.” While bi-partisan outrage over the Americans’ deaths was duly noted by the media and became a political football, the nature of Stevens’ work under Clinton and Obama received no mainstream media coverage, and the illegal and immoral wars against two countries continued apace.

But the Stevens’ issue pales in comparison to Clinton’s larger role in waging war on a sovereign nation for propagandistic “humanitarian” reasons. As with Iraq (Hussein) and Syria (Assad), she was a central player in the lies told about Mu’ammar Gaddafi to justify a war of aggression. Each in his turn was declared to be the new ******. In Gaddafi’s case, he was falsely accused of killing 10,000 people in Tripoli, having his soldiers use Viagra and rape as a matter of policy, and of being a bloody mad dictator intent on genocide. Rwanda and the Holocaust were elicited as warnings. President Obama justified the savage attack on Libya, fully supported by his Secretary of State Clinton, with the following lie: “We knew that if we wanted [sic] … if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” And he announced he was sending Clinton to London to meet with the Libyan “opposition” – aka terrorists.

The western media ran with these false accusations, as usual, as did Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, prominent Arab media. Like Iraq, Syria, and Serbia, it was another war of aggression based on lies, and Clinton was a primary player.

She was fully aware of developments in Libya from the start; knew that the rebels were Islamic militants armed and trained by the US, Britain, France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and UAE; knew that they summarily executed anyone they considered their enemies; knew that this war of lies was aimed at preventing Gaddafi from fulfilling his goal of economic independence, not just for Libya, but for the entire continent of Africa by introducing the gold dinar into Africa as common currency; knew, in short, that Libya had to be raped, its Central Bank destroyed, for its exploitation by western globalists. Thus her boss, Obama, in August 2011 confiscated $30 billion from Libya’s Central Bank that Gaddafi had planned to use for the establishment of the African IMF and African Central Bank. This is what Clinton termed “smart power at its best.” Under the pretext of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ Clinton supported the killing of tens of thousands and the destruction of an independent country to serve her masters.

Paolo Sensini characterizes the Democratic presidential nominee (and next president) perfectly:

Mrs. Clinton’s joyous exclamation on hearing the news of Gaddafi’s death sums up the recklessness and irresponsibility of an entire political class – an unrepentant class that has wreaked havoc around the world on a truly unprecedented scale.

When she thought cameras and microphones were off and exclaimed, “We came, we saw, he died,” she was speaking not just for herself but for the party and interests that she now represents.

“I’m with her,” says Michelle Obama.

“I am proud to stand with her,” says Bernie Sanders.

I wonder where the dead children of Libya stand.

But this is Hillary Clinton’s hour. Congratulations! Happy Anniversary!

We await your next war.

[Jarno]

...

Thanks dickhead for fucking up the thread. I'll report yo ass.

[DeleteMeModsPls]

I vote ISTj.

[squark]

She's lie .

That's the first suggestion I've seen in this thread that actually makes sense.

[HERO]

I think Hillary Clinton is ESTj. I’m not sure regarding subtype. I wouldn’t rule out Te-ESTj.

Alternative typing: Gamma SF (ISFj or Fi-ESFp)


https://www.newyorker.com/books/page...iterary-device

The Former First Lady As A Literary Device (By Avi Zenilman)

October 16, 2009

What’s the deal with first ladies and “The Brothers Karamazov”? In 2001, The New York Times reported that Laura Bush’s favorite piece of literature was the “Grand Inquisitor” scene from Dostoevsky’s novel. She saw it as an affirmation of faith:

In the dialogue with the Inquisitor, Jesus remains silent, and the chapter has two endings, the first tragic, the second a victory for Christianity.

For Mrs. Bush, there was no ambiguity. ”It’s about life, and it’s about death, and it’s about Christ,” she has said. ”I find it really reassuring.”

Then, Hillary Clinton revealed this week her fave is also “The Brothers Karamazov.” She had exactly the opposite take—for her, the chapter was a testament to the virtue of doubt, not certainty:

Asked to name the book that had made the biggest impact on her, she singled out “The Brothers Karamazov.” The parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel, she said, speaks to the dangers of certitude.

“For a lot of reasons, that was an important part of my thinking,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything.”

The gods of political punditry are smiling.

[Desert Financial]

You know, I could actually see her as LIE. Apparently her Si is really shitty.

She reminds me of all the female entjs I have worked with. Also she has a lot of te+ni in her candid speeches.

Hidden agenda - to be wealthy.

[Bertrand]

listening to hillary talk about TBK for an hour would make for a great postmodern art installation

[Tallmo]

LIE

[The Reality Denialist]

Gulenko types Clinton as SLE.

[Tallmo]

Hillary and Bill are in my opinion activators N-LIE and D-SEE

Hillary very much Normalizer

[PrettySavage]

I think Hillary Clinton is ESTj. I’m not sure regarding subtype. I wouldn’t rule out Te-ESTj.

Alternative typing: Gamma SF (ISFj or Fi-ESFp)


https://www.newyorker.com/books/page...iterary-device

The Former First Lady As A Literary Device (By Avi Zenilman)

October 16, 2009

What’s the deal with first ladies and “The Brothers Karamazov”? In 2001, The New York Times reported that Laura Bush’s favorite piece of literature was the “Grand Inquisitor” scene from Dostoevsky’s novel. She saw it as an affirmation of faith:

In the dialogue with the Inquisitor, Jesus remains silent, and the chapter has two endings, the first tragic, the second a victory for Christianity.

For Mrs. Bush, there was no ambiguity. ”It’s about life, and it’s about death, and it’s about Christ,” she has said. ”I find it really reassuring.”

Then, Hillary Clinton revealed this week her fave is also “The Brothers Karamazov.” She had exactly the opposite take—for her, the chapter was a testament to the virtue of doubt, not certainty:

Asked to name the book that had made the biggest impact on her, she singled out “The Brothers Karamazov.” The parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel, she said, speaks to the dangers of certitude.

“For a lot of reasons, that was an important part of my thinking,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything.”

The gods of political punditry are smiling.

It's utterly obvious she's LSE, I mean the whole totally of this leaves no other option:

https://www.thecut.com/article/hilla...-election.html

I would pull quotes, but it'd end up being 75% percent of the whole article, it's that illustrative. I had never speculated on her typing before stumbling on this piece but once I did, I knew halfway through it she was LSE.

Tremendous , clueless + no in sight. I find her super endearing, even thought she made me feel aggravated (but also protective? WTF) at her utter inability to handle Trump during the debates.

[PrettySavage]

@Bertrand the problem is that Hillary is not half mean enough. She makes me wanna coach her, it's maddening. I also can't understand why people hate her so much.

I mean objectively in terms of facts, sure. But when was politics, specially elections, ever a logic and objective affair? It's a popularity contest like the school ones, and she's Tracy Flick, only without the bite:





If she had this drive and assholery (I mean it in the best way possible) I could say it was out of fear and spite. But in the end I think it's just because she's lame and awkward.

[Bertrand]

its hard for me to believe Hilary even took the time to read and understand Dostoevsky, so its easy for me to believe she just spun a Ni soundbite for the campaign trail in order to check the block on "culture and morals" by way of name dropping TBK. To think she actually read it, and from the LSE point of view, saw her own demons in it. And by this I mean saw the danger of Ni in the character of the Inquisitor, to me strains credulity because she always seems so otherwise ideologically possessed in much the same way. Now, its not totally implausible because that kind of inconsistency is Ni polr, but its also Ni creative if we supply other operative facts. The reason I would lean toward LIE over LSE is hilary is far more ambitious and cuthroat and imaginative and compromised in a way hard to square with the idea that its Ni polr and not Ni creative. By this I mean she's so slimy its hard to think of her as having fallen ass backwards into so much political leverage and not read into it some kind of active and lithe strategy.

In keeping with this I had a SLI girlfriend and I absolutely could see her being in a supervisory relationship to hildawg. On one hand she was a classic liberal attorney who believed in hillary's platform and was disgusted by trump. On the other hand one time I said Hillary evoked in me the image of a mean grandma and she absolutely loved it--it was like I had given words to an ethical intuition she felt but could not express (we are both nevertheless liberals)

I totally agree though that she is not mean at all compared to real meanness, rather its more like amateur hour, but I find that consistent with 2d Se and a liberal platform.. I think meanness is a matter of perception, if you have stronger Se Hilary is sort of a joke, but for the Si types its still in there somewhere

[Spermatozoa]

^
Hillary is Fe PoLR and her shady record aside, this is one of, if not the main reason that she has always found it difficult to build a connection with voters compared to Trump, who is Fe HA. I also see very little, if any evidence of Se (volition/force). She comes across as rigid and does not use any body language when she speaks.

In the debates with Trump, Hillary talked constantly about what policies she would implement (Te) and the need to avoid extremes, recklessness and discomfort (Si). She has an underdeveloped Ni role as well, and this has led to serious lack of foresight e.g. the consequence of invading Libya. Hillary is very similar to Angela Merkel who is also SLI and the two politicians have a very similar set of strengths and weaknesses. They even dress the same way.

I have often remarked that there is a severe lack of Ni (intuition of time, future perception, connecting disparate data, predicting and adjusting for actions before they happen) in Western politics generally.

[PrettySavage]

@Bertrand You imagine way too much which it's to be expected, since I do believe 100% you're EII. I mean you're trying to put yourself into an LSE's shoes when you're PoLR, and assumes she would be self aware enough to recognize herself on his writings when she has little notion of who she really is...at least you appear to be aware you would prefer to believe she's LIE because that's a more "ambitious" (interesting) narrative.

In this case, truth is more simple and I guess boring (to you) then fiction. If she were LIE, Melania's body double wouldn't be a worldwide trending topic.


@Cuivienen she could be SLI-Te, yes.

[Bertrand]

To me Hilary is how LIE often comes across but half the humor is in how LIE absolutely cannot see it and continue to believe in their own myth

Adam Strange is a good example of this

@Bertrand You imagine way too much which it's to be expected, since I do believe 100% you're EII. I mean you're trying to put yourself into an LSE's shoes when you're PoLR, and assumes she would be self aware enough to recognize herself on his writings when she has little notion of who she really is...at least you appear to be aware you would prefer to believe she's LIE because that's a more "ambitious" (interesting) narrative.

In this case, truth is more simple and I guess boring (to you) then fiction. If she were LIE, Melania's body double wouldn't be a worldwide trending topic.

now this is a compliment I can really accept

[PrettySavage]

To me Hilary is how LIE TeSi often comes across but half the humor is in how LIE Bertrand absolutely cannot see it and continue to believe in his own myth

It must be a Delta thing to be so not self aware, you, Hillary...charming, indeed

[Bertrand]

you've turned the tables on me !

I can't believe it




but really, I do feel like the difference between ILI and LIE is more in the amount they mumble, not that LIE is some charismatic figure. In fact LSE is far more charismatic than LIE in general. So if the Fe polr theory has traction, LIE is closer than LSE by that logic.

[PrettySavage]

@Bertrand why do hell are you're bringing ILI into this? Ain't no ILI ever becoming US president. And LSEs charismatic ? Are we in the upside down lol. Everyone hates them at first, you just can't see it 'cuz their your Dual.

Your logic is indeed unique.

[Bertrand]

yeah, but I'm still right

[PrettySavage]

[Spermatozoa]

you've turned the tables on me !

I can't believe it




but really, I do feel like the difference between ILI and LIE is more in the amount they mumble, not that LIE is some charismatic figure. In fact LSE is far more charismatic than LIE in general. So if the Fe polr theory has traction, LIE is closer than LSE by that logic.

In the current political climate, Deltas would find the a career in the Democrat Party easiest. They are the status quo (Democrat/left-wing values have almost total dominance in our culture) and represent comfort, politeness, righteousness and are averse to "extreme" anything. Alphas, who also share Si/Ne, might find a niche in this party.

As a consequence, Betas (the opposite Quadra) would find a career in the Republican Party easiest. They are a party undergoing radical change and represent rebellion, irreverence, strength and are averse to inertia. Gammas, who also share Se/Ni, might find a niche in this party.

Ideal type for a Democrat politician (at the moment) = EII, social cp6
Ideal type for a Republican politician (at the moment) = SLE, sexual 3 (EII's conflictor)

[Bertrand]

yeah I agree with that. the alt right is hella beta. Ive actually written posts on that in the past

I do think once trump is btfo by mueller, gammas will take up whats left of the left from hilary's hackjob on it, and move it forward. I don't see beta/gamma agreeing on much for long

I think trump was the best thing for the left long term because he really burned a lot of the dead wood. he is true to his word, once he's gone he will have drained the swamp

I feel like this is actually the purpose and nobility of beta

[Spermatozoa]

yeah I agree with that. the alt right is hella beta. Ive actually written posts on that in the past

I do think once trump is btfo by mueller, gammas will take up whats left of the left from hilary's hackjob on it, and move it forward. I don't see beta/gamma agreeing on much for long

If the left is in a Delta phase at the moment, any internal restructuring is likely to create an Alpha, not a Gamma-driven movement. That would make sense because the Republicans are in power now, and as their power consolidates they will move from a Beta to a Gamma phase. However the GOP will continue to win and win unless Democrats evolve. This will require the left as a whole to abandon their current ambition of open borders "we are all one" globalism, which is unpopular and self-destructive. What you replace it with is up to you, but you will only be able to regain power if you learn the right lessons and adapt. Trump's ideas are more popular than he is. Obama and Hillary's ideas were not.

My view is that there are no real winners in politics, and success is therefore somewhat relative. Enjoy your time in the sun, buy expensive wine, hoard it and save for later lol

I think trump was the best thing for the left long term because he really burned a lot of the dead wood. he is true to his word, once he's gone he will have drained the swamp

You may be correct. I have no sympathy for the left right now, as they're out of power for a good reason. I don't want them to disappear entirely, though, because that would lead to complacency on the right and hasten their trajectory. What Trump has done is destroy the Republican Party as it existed in its Alpha phase (Reagan, Bush Sr and Jr) and it is now in Beta with the alt-right (revolution, transformation).

I feel like this is actually the purpose and nobility of beta

The purpose of Beta (nationalism) is to correct the excesses of Delta (globalists/SJW/immigrants etc who make the nation weak). Once the alt-right has succeeded in removing them, they will become Gamma and a new Alpha left-wing who have different issues will arise.

[vesstheastralsilky]

LIE-Te

Aside from Type theory, she has an extremely suave and polished outward manner that shows much self-control. Other LIEs I've known but IRL can fly off the handle over nothing depending on how well their life is going, once you get past the short term public persona. I had a live in relationship once with one and it turned into an absolute nightmare. I avoid her now like the plague. But upon first meetings, there was an attraction, being impressed and much desire to get along as best as we could...

I think Hillary is gifted at how she knows how to come across to an audience but this is perhaps a learned personal skill that isn't dependent on type. During the elections she struck me as being very well-behaved while Trump came across like a primal hotwire. Since so many Americans were and still are very angry in this country regardless of their party affiliation, it is no wonder he took office because he naturally resonated most with the vital tonus of the masses: impropriety, shock value, anger and inconsolable discontent... with the added advantage of appearing to promise wealth through affiliation (which is irrational but how many perceived him who voted for him, nonetheless).

[Blue]

Gulenko types Clinton as SLE.

Is he for real, and does he still have this opinion? That sounds ridiculous.

[khcs]

Hillary Clinton - ESTP - Zhukov

Hillary Clinton.jpg

[vesstheastralsilky]

The Poll's way off. She is LIE ENTJ-Te

THE LAB EXPERIMENTER per my archetypes.

I'm positive she is my Conflictor.