Exclusive: U.S. officials are
pushing a dubious new scheme to “unify” a shattered Libya, but the political
risk at home is that voters will finally realize Hillary Clinton’s
responsibility for the mess, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Hillary Clinton’s signature
project as Secretary of State – the “regime change” in Libya – is now sliding
from the tragic to the tragicomic as her successors in the Obama administration
adopt increasingly desperate strategies for imposing some kind of order on the
once-prosperous North African country torn by civil war since Clinton pushed
for the overthrow and murder of longtime Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The problem that Clinton
did much to create has grown more dangerous since Islamic State
terrorists have gained a foothold in Sirte and begun their characteristic
beheading of “infidels” as well as their plotting for terror attacks in nearby
Europe.
There is also desperation
among some Obama administration officials because the worsening Libyan fiasco
threatens to undermine not only President Barack Obama’s legacy but Clinton’s
drive for the Democratic presidential nomination and then the White House. So,
the officials felt they had no choice but to throw caution to the wind or
— to mix metaphors — some Hail Mary passes.
The latest daring move
was a sea landing in Tripoli by the U.S./U.N-formulated “unity government,”
which was cobbled together by Western officials in hotel rooms in Morocco and
Tunisia. But instead of “unity,” the arrival by sea threatened to
bring more disunity and war by seeking to muscle aside two rival
governments.
The sea landing at a naval
base in Tripoli became necessary because one of those rival
governments refused to let the “unity” officials fly into Libya’s capital.
So, instead, the “unity” leaders entered Libya by boat from Tunisia and are
currently operating from the naval base where they landed.
With this
unusual move, the Obama administration is reminding longtime national
security analysts of other fiascos in which Washington sought to decide the
futures of other countries by shaping a government externally, as with the
Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s and the Iraqi National Congress in 2003, and
then imposing those chosen leaders on the locals.
(When I heard about the
sea landing, I flashed back on images of Gen. Douglas MacArthur
splashing ashore as he returned to the Philippines in World War II.)
Making the Scheme Work
But the new mystery is how
this Libyan “unity government” expects to convince its rivals to accept its
legitimacy without the military muscle to actually take over governance across
Libya.
The Obama administration
risks simply introducing a third rival government into the mix. Though the
“unity government” drew participants from the other two governments, U.S.
resistance to incorporating several key figures, including Gen. Khalifa Haftar,
a military strongman in eastern Libya, has threatened to simply extend and
possibly expand the civil war.
The U.S. scheme for
establishing the authority of the “unity government” centers on using the
$85 billion or so in foreign reserves in Libya’s Central Bank to bring other
Libyan leaders onboard. But that strategy may test the question of whether the
pen – poised over the Central Bank’s check book – is mightier than the sword,
since the militias associated with the rival regimes have plenty of weapons.
Besides the carrot of handing
out cash to compliant Libyan politicians and fighters, the Obama administration
also is waving a stick, threatening to hit recalcitrant Libyans with financial
sanctions or labeling them “terrorists” with all the legal and other dangers
that such a designation carries.
But can these tactics –
bribery and threats – actually unify a deeply divided Libya, especially when
some of the powerful factions are Islamist and see their role as more than
strictly political, though the Islamist faction in Tripoli is also opposed to
the Islamic State?
I’m told that another unity
plan that drew wider support from the competing factions and included Haftar as
Libya’s new commander-in-chief was rejected by U.S. officials because of fears
that Haftar might become another uncontrollable strongman like Gaddafi.
Nevertheless, Haftar and his
troops are considered an important element in taking on the Islamic State and,
according to intelligence sources, are already collaborating with U.S. and
European special forces in that fight.
After the sea landing on
Wednesday, the “unity government” began holding official meetings on Thursday,
but inside the heavily guard naval base. How the “unity” Prime Minister Fayez
Sirraj and six other members of the Presidency Council can extend their
authority across Tripoli and then across Libya clearly remained a work in
progress, however.
The image of these “unity”
officials, representing what’s called the Government of National Accord, holed
up with their backs to the sea at a naval base, unable to dispatch their
subordinates to take control of government buildings and ministries, recalls how
the previous internationally recognized government, the House of
Representatives or HOR, met on a cruise ship in Tobruk in the east.
Meanwhile, HOR’s chief rival,
the General National Congress, renamed the National Salvation government,
insisted on its legitimacy in Tripoli, but its control, too, was limited to
several Libyan cities.
On Wednesday, National
Salvation leader Khalifa Ghwell called the “unity” officials at the naval base
“infiltrators” and demanded their surrender. Representatives of the “unity
government” then threatened to deliver its rivals’ names to Interpol
and the U.N. for “supporting terrorism.”
On Friday, the European
Union imposed asset freezes on Ghwell and the leaders of the rival
parliaments in Tripoli and in Tobruk. According to some accounts, the mix
of carrots and sticks has achieved some progress for the “unity government”
as 10 towns and cities in western Libya indicated their support for the
new leadership.
Shortly after being selected
by U.S. and U.N. officials to head the “unity government,” Sirraj reached out
to Haftar in a meeting on Jan. 30, 2016, but the move upset U.S. officials who
favored isolating Haftar from the new government.
Political Stakes
The success or failure of this
latest Obama administration effort to impose some order on Libya – and get the
participants in the civil war to concentrate their fire on the Islamic
State – could have consequences politically in the United States as well.
The continuing crisis
threatens to remind Democratic primary voters about Hillary Clinton’s role in
sparking the chaos in 2011 when she pressured President Obama to counter a
military offensive by Gaddafi against what he called Islamic
terrorists operating in the east.
Though Clinton and other “liberal
interventionists” around Obama insisted that the goal was simply to protect
Libyans from a possible slaughter, the U.S.-backed airstrikes inside Libya
quickly expanded into a “regime change” operation, slaughtering much of the
Libyan army.
Clinton’s State Department email
exchanges revealed that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to
pronounce a “Clinton doctrine,” bragging about how Clinton’s clever use of
“smart power” could get rid of demonized foreign leaders like Gaddafi. But the
Clinton team was thwarted when President Obama seized the spotlight when
Gaddafi’s government fell.
But Clinton didn’t miss a
second chance to take credit on Oct. 20, 2011, after militants captured
Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Appearing on a TV
interview, Clinton celebrated
Gaddafi’s demise with the quip, “we came; we saw; he died.”
However, with Gaddafi and his
largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic militants expanded their power
over the country. Some were terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned.
One Islamic terror group
attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S.
Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel, an incident
that Clinton called the worst moment of her four-year tenure as Secretary of
State.
As the violence spread, the
United States and other Western countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli.
Once prosperous with many social services, Libya descended into the
category of failed state with the Islamic State taking advantage of the power
vacuum to seize control of Sirte and other territory. In one grisly incident,
Islamic State militants marched Coptic Christians onto a beach and beheaded
them.
Yet, on the campaign trail,
Clinton continues to defend her judgment in instigating the Libyan war. She
claims that Gaddafi had “American blood on his hands,” although she doesn’t
spell out exactly what she’s referring to. There remain serious
questions about the two primary incidents blamed on Libya in which
Americans died – the 1986 La Belle bombing in Berlin and the bombing of Pan Am
Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
But whatever Gaddafi’s
guilt in that earlier era, he renounced terrorism during George W. Bush’s
presidency and surrendered his unconventional military arsenal. He even
assisted Bush’s “war on terror.” So, Gaddafi’s grisly fate has become a
cautionary tale for what can happen to a leader who makes major security
concessions to the United States.
The aftermath of the
Clinton-instigated “regime change” in Libya also shows how little Clinton and
other U.S. officials learned from the Iraq War disaster. Clinton has rejected
any comparisons between her vote for the Iraq War in 2002 and her orchestration
of the Libyan war in 2011, saying that
“conflating” them is wrong. She also has sought to shift blame onto
European allies who also pushed for the war.
Though her Democratic rival,
Sen. Bernie Sanders, hasn’t highlighted her key role in the Libya fiasco,
Clinton can expect a tougher approach from the Republicans if she wins the
nomination. The problem with the Republicans, however, is that they have
obsessed over the details of the Benghazi incident, spinning all sorts of
conspiracy theories, missing the forest for the trees.
Clinton’s ultimate
vulnerability on Libya is that she was a principal author of another disastrous
“regime change” that has spread chaos not only across the Middle East and North
Africa but into Europe, where the entire European Union project, a major
post-World War II accomplishment, is now in danger.
Clinton may claim she has lots
of foreign policy experience, but the hard truth is that much of her
experience has involved making grievous mistakes and bloody miscalculations.
Investigative reporter Robert
Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative,
either in print
here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
