In 2011, Hillary Clinton, then the Secretary of State, became a “strong advocate” within the administration for the NATO-backed intervention, swinging President Obama. Following the intervention, Clinton crowed to The Washington Post, saying “we set into motion a policy that was on the right side of history, on the right side of our values, on the right side of our strategic interests in the region,” with her allies labeling the policy a foreign policy success.
“Libya’s liberation, for better or worse, was Hillary’s War,” wrote reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes in their biography HRC.
Today, Reuters reports that “threatened African nations” are urging Western nations to act and resolve the growing crisis coming from Libya, as terrorist organizations who’ve seized loose weapons from the country destabilize the region.
African leaders on Tuesday urged western nations to act to resolve the crisis in Libya which has sent shock waves across the vast arid Sahel band and threatened to destabilize fragile regional governments.
More than three years after a French-led NATO military action helped oust Libya’s longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi, two rival governments are competing for legitimacy, raising fears of a civil war for control over the country’s oil wealth. …
The political void in the north has allowed Islamist groups to regroup in Libya’s barren south and from there threaten nations including Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad. …
Mali became one of the first collateral victims of the chaos that erupted following Gaddafi’s ouster when Islamist fighters, many armed with weapons seized from Libyan government arsenals, overran the country’s north in 2012. …
African states accuse the west of ignoring their concerns and say that once Gaddafi was killed they left the country to fend for itself.
“Now Libya is fertile ground for terrorism and all sorts of criminals,” Chadian President Idriss Deby told the forum, adding that NATO had an obligation to finish what it started in Libya. …
And today, the State Department was forced to respond to these growing concerns from the region that the intervention has helped armed groups such as Boko Haram and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.