Clinton's Libya fiasco

James Antle:

...
Clinton was secretary of state when President Obama ordered "kinetic military action" in Libya. She was a prime mover inside in the administration backing preventive war for regime change. And unlike George W. Bush in Iraq, Obama and Clinton did not even seek a congressional vote.

"We came, we saw, he died," Clinton chortledabout ousted dictator Muammar Qaddafi. And today, unlike Iraq before the surge, Libya has descended into chaos and is teeming with Islamists. The civil war resumed in 2014 and shows no signs of abating.

What lessons from Iraq did Clinton apply to Libya? Her defenders point to the absence of American casualties. As with her husband's 78-day NATO bombing of Yugoslavia over Kosovo, the campaign was kept in the air. There were no boots on the ground.
...

If in Iraq we won the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein but lost the peace, in Libya we did not even try. We essentially helped topple the government and told the Libyan people to have a nice day. The lesson Clinton and Obama learned from Iraq seems entirely political: If we minimize the involvement of American troops, there will be no electoral consequences for the war no matter how big a disaster it is.

Make no mistake, Libya was a disaster. The country has been described as Woodstock for jihadists. It is having a generally destabilizing influence as weapons flow freely from Libya into armed conflicts in Mali, Syria and elsewhere. Libyan anarchy has helped spark the migrant crisis with which the European Union is now dealing.

Nation-building failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Was nation-breaking supposed to work in Libya?
...

She apparently learned nothing from the fiasco or the subsequent tragedy in Benghazi.  But Democrats do not seem to care if she is incompetent.