A June 4 New York Times front page story reported that “the bomber who killed 22 people at a pop concert in Manchester, England, last month had met in Libya with members of an Islamic State unit linked to the November 2015 Paris terrorist attack.” The 2011 war against Libya—which the Washington Post called “Hillary’s War”—was never a smart idea. Now we’re seeing just how idiotic it was.
ISIS in Libya has become the head coach for much of Europe’s terrorism. Cameron Colquhoun, former senior counterterrorism analyst at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, opined, “most of the blood spilled in Europe in the more spectacular attacks, using guns and bombs, really all began at the time when Katibat al-Battar [ISIS in Syria] went back to Libya. That is where the threat trajectory to Europe began — when these men returned to Libya and had breathing space.”
What is the source of ISIS’ “breathing space?” The answer is in the unclassified public domain: President Barak Obama’s stupendously stupid 2011 war against Libya that overthrew the Libyan government and left a wilderness in its place. You’ll recall that the Libyan strongman, Muammar Gaddafi, had abandoned weapons of mass destruction and paid reparations to the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. He wasn’t a threat to us. But Obama’s Best and the Brightest, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice, and senior White House advisor Samantha Power, were set on regime change.
After mocking our failed attempts at nation building in Iraq under George W. Bush, they went and did the same thing again, with predicable results.
They professed an exclusive humanitarian justification for the war. But the military tactics and targets of the armed forces and inadvertent candor by administration officials demonstrated that regime change was the objective from the outset. They wanted to bring human rights to a place that had never experienced it before, and all this while the Clinton Foundation danced over an estimated $10- $25 million in donations from Saudi Arabia—a human rights graveyard. Nothing dries faster than a Hillary Clinton tear over human rights.
Obama was criminally myopic in neglecting to consider that Libya’s governance after Gaddafi’s ouster and murder would be a cure far worse than the disease. He and his Iron Women seemingly hallucinated that a Libyan George Washington and James Madison were hiding in Libya’s Sahara Desert ready to parachute into Tripoli to metamorphose the politically primitive nation into a secular democracy.
And what did we reap? A dead ambassador. Four Americans killed. The scorn of the world at our criminal naiveté, the contempt of our enemies, the lies of Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice. And now a training ground for terrorists in Britain.
If there’s one lesson we should have learned from the Iraq War, it’s that power vacuums catapult the most ruthless, corrupt, and megalomaniacal onto the commanding heights. After our overthrow of Saddam Hussein fourteen years ago, we saw 4,000 Americans killed in battle and the continuing bloodletting and chaos in Iraq. Post-Gaddafi Libya proved equally dystopic.
Karim Mezran, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, informed PBS’s Frontline. “Criminality is skyrocketing. Insecurity is pervasive. There are no jobs. It’s hard to get food and electricity. There’s fighting, there’s fear … I see very few bright spots.” There is no single central government. Power is splintered along tribal, ethnic, regional, and religious lines.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees flee from Libyan shores annually across the Mediterranean hoping for asylum in Europe. Tens of thousands die during the precarious sea journey, and Europe has become convulsed by a refugee flood.
Hillary Clinton, nevertheless, clucked, “We came, we saw, he died,” and saluted the Libyan war as “smart power at its best.”
In sum, President Obama and his Best and Brightest feminists created “breathing space” for ISIS in Libya, which has enabled it to quarterback terrorism in Europe. That nexus justifies President Donald Trump’s Executive Order listing Libya as a nation of heightened concern in the issuance of visas and the entry of refugees. The link to President Obama’s disintegration of Libya is in plain view. But the mainstream media stays silent, like the adult spectators in The Emperor’s New Clothes until a little child exclaims, “But he hasn’t got anything on.”