Hillary: Obama "trusted my judgment" -- and he got screwed.

[thesquanderer]

Bernie has often said that, while Hillary has plenty of foreign policy experience, her foreign policy judgment is questionable, which generally brings him to Iraq. Hillary's comeback line is that, despite having made the wrong call on the IWR, Obama trusted her judgment enough to make her SOS. So how did that end up working out for him?

As the thorough retelling in the New York Times last weekend showed, Hillary's views were probably the deciding factor in Obama's decision to support the intervention in Libya.

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.

This is further supported in the email discussed at In These Times, where on 3/19/11 Anne-Marie Slaughter (Hilary's former director of policy planning at the State Department) wrote:

“I cannot imagine how exhausted you must be after this week, but I have NEVER been prouder of having worked for you”... “Turning POTUS around on this is a major win for everything we have worked for.”

Philosophically, it probably comes down to this: In a questionable scenario, she would rather try than not try. Again from the NYT article:

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.”

In other words, err on the side of interventionism. Is that really the philosophy we want in the White House?

Hillary may pooh-pooh it, but I think Obama's "Don’t do stupid stuff" beats "I'd rather be caught trying." If you're not darn sure of a more positive outcome, I'd rather not have the blood on my hands, thank you.

And it gets worse: When offered possible ways to de-escalate, she wasn't interested. Referenced somewhat in the Times piece, but in more detail in a Salon article:

Qaddafi’s son Seif wanted to negotiate a ceasefire with the U.S. government, opening up communications with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Clinton later intervened and asked the Pentagon to stop talking to the Qaddafi regime.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich wrote a letter to Clinton and Obama in August 2011, warning against the war. “I have been contacted by an intermediary in Libya who has indicated that President Muammar Gadhafi is willing to negotiate an end to the conflict under conditions which would seem to favor Administration policy,” the Democratic lawmaker said. His plea was ignored.

A Pentagon intelligence official told Seif Qaddafi that his messages were falling on deaf ears. “Everything I am getting from the State Department is that they do not care about being part of this,” he explained.

“Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all,” the U.S. intelligence official added.

Now Libya is a mess, and even a haven for ISIS. Yes, Obama trusted her judgment, and he got screwed. How many chances do we have to give her?

(emphasis in quotes added)

[Darb]

1. Now tell me how

you would have quarterbacked the Panthers in the Super Bowl.

[thesquanderer]

5. More relevant questions than that...

Based on Bernie's past positions and speeches--not a pacifist, but not nearly as quick to support intervention--what call do you think he would have made? And do you think he would have dismissed offers to negotiate?

How many mistakes do you allow someone before you say, gee, maybe they don't have the best judgment in this particular area? Hillary had already gotten one free pass, and blew it again.

Also, Hillary, no longer SOS, supports a Syrian no-fly zone. Obama does not, Bernie does not. But a number of Republicans do.

If you like a hawkish, practically neocon foreign policy, fine, you're entitled to that. But let's not claim that Hillary wouldn't have one, nor ignore its consequences.

[Darb]

6. Ok Nostradomus.

Whatever you say.

[daleanime]

54. Thank you for your honesty.....

I greatly prefer to not waste my time discussing things with someone who's thoughts are already set in stone.

[FlatBaroque]

2. Hillary is eager to continue pursuing Israel's foreign policy objectives. /

[thesquanderer]

21. I don't think what happened in Libya had anything to do with Israel...? (n/t)

[grossproffit]

24. Israel? Wrong continent.

[Vattel]

3. This should by itself disqualify her from being CIC.

She is too stupid to realize that war should be used only a last resort.

[thereismore]

4. Yep. I bet he is regretting the stain of Libya and Honduras on his legacy. nt

[Downwinder]

11. BO called Honduras a coupe.

SOS ignored him. Showed he had no authority over State. Just a figurehead.

[malletgirl02]

47. Maybe that is the real reason Clinton left

Obama got tired of being undermined by her.

[Downwinder]

50. Took a long time. Things started happening when

Kerry stepped in.

[Cheese Sandwich]

7. The biggest mistake Obama made was making Hillary Sec. of State

[thereismore]

12. I agree. People died. nt

[Cheese Sandwich]

13. a LOT of people died

[peacebird]

31. Probably biggest was Rahm Emmanuel, but i dare say Rahm suggested Hillary.

Rahm surely helped 'guide' Obama decisions on Geitner, etc...

[thesquanderer]

34. Maybe Hillary for foreign policy, and Rahm for domestic? (n/t)

[peacebird]

36. Yes

[CoffeeCat]

8. Hillary is a neocon; Her Middle East foreign-policy adviser was Robert Kagan

I don't understand why anyone would be surprised by this.

Hillary is a neocon. She's officially out of the closet.

Robert Kagan, the founder of the warmongering neocon movement, endorsed Hillary last week. He's praised her foreign-policy stances and actions publicly for many years.

Hillary hand picked Kagan to be one of her Middle East foreign-policy advisers while she was Secretary of State. Two neocons in a pod. What did everyone think they were going to do--bake cakes?

Libya is one of the countries that the neocons identified as a target, in 1996. Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya are their wish-list countries; the ones they want to destabilize, invade, plunder and ultimately control. All for profit.

Aren't they adorable?

Hillary is a neocon. She gave them Libya on a silver platter. Now the place is a destroyed failed state and a vacuum for terrorism and Isis. The entire country is completely without a government, the people are suffering and flowing into Europe. More than 250,000 displaced. This was exactly the goal.

[thesquanderer]

14. Eisenhower warned us about the MIC, and we're still not listening. (n/t)

[peacebird]

33. And Kissinger is a mentor.....

[AtomicKitten]

45. Here's a great piece on Libya that was on Democracy Now.

The Libya Gamble: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Push for War & the Making of a Failed State

BERNIE SANDERS: "So, I think Secretary Clinton and I have a fundamental disagreement: I’m not quite the fan of regime change that I believe she is."

[Betty Karlson]

9. Clinton has plenty of experience making the wrong decisions,

and then reluctantly admitting it years later. Not presidential material at all, however many ovaries she has.

[polly7]

10. Qaddafi more than once indicated he was willing to step aside.

This was about a hell of a lot more than regime change simply for the sake of replacing Qaddafi.

Libya - a sovereign nation - destroyed because of lies for PNAC, the big Int'l banks and so many more reasons - all to do with money, of course.

[CoffeeCat]

15. Libya is a failed nation in tatters

and people think this means that Hillary failed. She succeeded for the neocons, because this is what the neocons desire.

They need these countries powerless, weak, bombed to smithereens--so the next steps can be taken.

This is when they rape the area of its natural resources, namely oil--and set up shop to rebuild--making untold amounts of money for their friends in high places.

It's all laid out in the PNAC plan, "Rebuilding America's Defenses."

This is about maintaining American's status as a Superpower. These war sociopaths erroneously believed that the only way for America to maintain power was to steal the resources and control the geography in that area of the world.

All for money. All for power. They don't care that they've killed millions of innocents to do it or that all of the countries on their target list (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya) have people starving, homeless, destitute and fleeing to Europe.

These areas, especially Libya and Syria are now terrorist havens where ISIS is growing.

And Hillary is a major player. No doubt about that. She cheer leaded us into Iraq, she wanted to set up a no-fly zone in Syria and she handed the neocons Libya, with Robert Kagan (the founder of PNAC) working diligently by her side as one of her closest foreign-policy advisers while she was Secretary of State.

How people don't see this or why they refuse to deal with this horror in our party--is beyond me.

[polly7]

16. Well said, CoffeeCat.

I think a lot of people choose not to see it - they're either too uncomfortable with the suffering or, others, basically just have no interest - what they don't see doesn't affect them.

IS supposedly has recruited/is recruiting more members from Libya than anywhere else.

Boko Haram got it's start in Africa d/t Libya's ruin. Burning people alive. Indescribable brutality against whole villages.

Yet no-one is to be held accountable for allowing all of this to get started.

We live in a sick, sick world.

[Svafa]

19. It's all about the shock doctrine. nt

[randome]

37. He threatened the Arab Spring revolt with a bloodbath.

That doesn't sound like a leader listening to his subjects.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[polly7]

39. Yeah, you tried that same line yesterday. Pure, propaganda bullshit same as it was less

than 12 hrs. ago.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1413501

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1251&pid=1413524

[oasis]

17. The average American voter will shed no tears for terrorists like Qaddafi.

Nor will I.

[thesquanderer]

20. Fair enough. But ISIS is a much worse threat than Qaddafi was.

Have our actions not helped make a bad situation even worse?

[EndElectoral]

18. Libya, Syria, Honduras, the abandonment of the Green Revolution in Iran, Ukraine, Russia, China...

“it should be abundantly clear to those who support Syrian President Bashar al- Assad’s regime that their days are numbered.”

- HRC in 2012

There are too many issues to even address such as the expansion of Boko Haram in Africa, the atrocities in Gaza, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Yemen mess, the immigration issues, the trade issues....

I mean I get she admires Kissinger, but enough already..

[Beacool]

22. Yeah, poor Obama, if only he had been president and made up his own mind.

What a load of bull.........

Offensive to both Obama and Hillary.

You don't have to "give her any chances", but millions are voting for her.

[thesquanderer]

25. So, as SOS, was she a major influence on foreign policy or not?

And did you see the quote in the OP... “Turning POTUS around on this is a major win for everything we have worked for”?

And what about "“Secretary Clinton does not want to negotiate at all" ? Sounds like she put up the firewall there, not the President. Those overtures probably never even made it past her to him.

Of course, ultimately, Obama takes responsibility, good or bad, for the outcome of all the foreign policy carried out in his terms. That doesn't mean he was not persuaded and did not count on the input from his staff, and saying so is not an insult to him. To the extent that bad advice came from his staff, or that their own related decisions were problematic, is it not reasonable to consider those sources, especially if they are aiming to be making foreign policy decisions in the next administration?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

30. Well said.

And true.

Henry Kissinger.
Sydney Blumenthal
Victoria Nuland

The list is quite long.

[Beacool]

43. SOS consult continually with the WH.

You act as if she went rogue and took actions that the WH had no knowledge of and that's just plain nonsense. The fact that some of you don't like Hillary doesn't mean that Obama got screwed, that's just your biased opinion.

[thesquanderer]

46. You are putting words in my mouth.

Of course it would be nonsense to say "she went rogue and took actions that the WH had no knowledge of" -- that's why I didn't say or even imply any such thing. I do think she gave what turned out to be bad advice. I think she also probably prevented the peace overtures from ever reaching him for consideration.

[BlueMTexpat]

27. +1! eom

[ChairmanAgnostic]

29. Millions have been wrong before.

Say, who was president before Obama? Did he get millions of votes?

[thesquanderer]

32. And would we be giving Condalzeeza Rice a pass on Bush foreign policy disasters?

Especially if there are ones where we know her fingerprints are all over them?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

42. sadly, her role has been studiously ignored

by the GOP, the Dems, and the media.

Hell, they even wanted her to run for president.

[malletgirl02]

48. Hillary Clinton is

running on her experience as Secretary of State. Since she is running on this experience we have the right and the obligation to examine this experience.

[amborin]

23. ISIS surging in Libya:

What We Know About ISIS in Libya

The self-described Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has long been making a push to capitalize on the chaos in Libya.

For over a year, it has carried out terror attacks, taken over territory and released propaganda from its franchise in Libya. Now, a new assessment from the Pentagon states the number of ISIS fighters in Libya has doubled since the fall to over 5,000, spurring fresh debate among security officials over the possibility of foreign intervention.

Analysts and officials worry that Libya is increasingly becoming a sort of fallback option for ISIS as it loses territory and power in Syria and Iraq.

“If we look at the raw numbers, the presence of ISIS is definitely strengthening and growing. I think the security threat they pose is definitely going up,” Riccardo Fabiani, senior North Africa analyst at political risk research firm Eurasia Group, told The WorldPost.

The threat ISIS presents in Libya is different than in other nations, and is related both to the group's changing capabilities and to the country's ongoing instability


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/isis-presence-in-libya_us_56b369e2e4b08069c7a6352f

[randome]

26. Qaddafi was threatening the Arab Spring in Libya with a bloodbath.

The international community -including the Arab League- was asking us to intervene. What would you have done? Shrugged your shoulders and walked away?
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[thesquanderer]

38. Did you read the NY Times piece?

I'm not saying it wasn't a tough call. There were arguments for and against within the administration, and as they said, it was basically 50-50 until Hillary pushed it over the edge toward action... and that gets back to her philosophy of, if the outcome is about equally likely to be bad either way, err on the side of being "caught trying." Personally, I feel the opposite. Kind of like the hippocratic oath, first do no harm. How you feel about that is likely to determine your feelings about what ultimately happened.

[leveymg]

40. The problem is that the No-Fly Zone became continuous NATO bombing and special forces operations

that expanded into serial regime-change that spread into Syria. But, this mission creep was no mere happenstance, as it suited the purposes of France, Qatar and Israel. Lacking a real focus, who was the President to say no, particularly with Clinton and Petraeus forceful advocates of "humanitarian intervention"? Eventually, after catastrophe caught up with the program -- Libyan tribesmen cultivated by Stevens went al-Qaeda, slaying the US Ambassador -- Obama finally waved it off. But, by then, the whole region was crawling with Jihadis armed with looted MANPADs carrying out holy war on behalf of their Gulf State paymasters.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

28. Anyone trust in Hillary will be in trouble,

ESPECIALLY if it involves her judgment.

[My Good Babushka]

35. I really don't know what I'm going to do

if I'm backed into a corner in November and my only choice is Clusterbombs Clinton or nobody.

[BlueMTexpat]

41. A lot of our latter-day revisionists on Qaddafi

so they can wholly blame that crisis on Hillary have no idea what was happening in Libya before the intervention. No, it ended up not going as intended, but there is plenty of blame to spread around. Instead of recognizing that, it's Hillary who gets ALL the blame from SBS supporters and other virulent detractors.

Here's is one article from Salon that illustrates one of the many problems: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/05/20/violence_in_libya_the_country_s_chaos_is_rooted_in_qaddafi_s_paranoia.html

Because he hadn't developed a strong national military (likely for fear of being deposed by that military himself), Qaddafi recruited mercenaries from sub-Saharan nations. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/08/former-qaddafi-mercenaries-describe-fighting-in-libyan-war/244356/

Qaddafi at the time of the Libyan War was far from the once adulated hero of pan-Africanism (also supporting anti-colonial and rebel movements including the Provos and PLO, etc.). There was a steady stream of incidents that had made him VERY unpopular with European governments. The murder of Yvonne Fletcher in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Yvonne_Fletcher), for example, as well as the Lockerbie tragedy; France had its issues with the Civil War in Chad, Libyan involvement in the bombing of Flight UTA 772 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTA_Flight_772) and Cecile Sarkozy, while still married to husband Nicolas, FINALLY managed to convince Qaddafi to release medical personnel who had been on death row for years after being tortured into confessing they had infected Libyan babies with the HIV virus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_trial_in_Libya).

Even little Switzerland, long known for its neutrality, was practically at its wits' end with Libya. Swiss police arrested Qaddafi's son for mistreatment of his household staff while on a visit to Switzerland (he was quickly released) so Libya abducted two Swiss businessmen in retaliation, causing a major diplomatic crisis. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-secret-battle-of-lazzarotto-an-insider-s-look-at-the-libyan-swiss-hostage-crisis-a-733285.html

Qaddafi's paranoia was spinning out of control, was targeting civilians, and there were real fears of what would happen if he died. His sons had none of their father's personal charisma nor his original political ideals. They had, however, inherited his zeal for revenge, retaliation and terror in full measure. They were tried for war crimes in Libya (hardly an objective venue) and to no one's surprise, Saif was sentenced to death. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/28/saif-al-islam-sentenced-death-by-court-in-libya-gaddafi-son This, of course, has occurred only recently.

Libya had long been considered a state sponsor of terrorism until Bush II rehabilitated Qaddafi's image and re-established diplomatic relations in 2006 - an incredible irony considering how he destroyed Saddam Hussein who was certainly no worse.

Most Americans never even heard of Libya before "Benghazi." Most still don't seem to realize that it was NATO who was asked by the UN for military rather than mere logistics support, because Libyan civilians were clearly being targeted. http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_71652.htm The Arab League also strongly supported this action.

Hillary was but one tiny cog in a HUGE wheel and there were LOTS of reasons why the intervention SHOULD have happened. The problem was that it was not well-coordinated and not well followed through.

Yet, just as Hillary's vote on the IWR was the single cause of the War in Iraq (or so one would think given the number of strident posts about that), it is Hillary who must shoulder ALL the blame for Libya.

[thesquanderer]

44. I do not blame it all on Hillary.

But in analyzing whether her participation and influence made the situation better or worse, after reading the links in my OP, I would say the latter. And so there is some responsibility there. I do not think she made the best calls, and if elected, the final call will be hers.

[malletgirl02]

49. Hillary Clinton is running on her

experience it is fair to examine such experience.

[juxtaposed]

51. Obama got kicked in the ass b/c of hrc.

[Metric System]

52. The President obviously doesn't feel that way.

[Jefferson23]

53. Clinton think twice? Why? She is totally awesome. NO one better.