Let me go back to Secretary of State Clinton’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday one more time. I keep going back to it because there is so much there. And I go to the report in The Guardian, an English newspaper, because it covered more than just what Secretary Clinton said about Benghazi. US media focused on Benghazi, understandably, but other things she said were just as interesting. I talked about one of them yesterday. Let me comment on a couple others today.
First, during last year’s campaign, President Obama and his supporters were constantly telling us that Osama Bin Laden was dead and the threat from Al Qaeda against the United States was gone. In his inaugural address on Monday, President Obama said “[a] decade of war is ending.
But Secretary Clinton told Congress something quite different on Wednesday. She said that the jihadists in northern Africa were a direct threat to the United States and that:
"We now face a spreading jihadist threat. … We have killed a lot of them, including, of course, Bin Laden. But we have to recognize that this is a global movement. …
What we have to do is to recognize we are in for a long-term struggle here."
If this is her view, it may be good that Secretary Clinton is leaving. It doesn’t sound like she and the President are on the same page. (Or to put it more up-to-date: They may not be using the same e-reader.)
Second, during our bombing of Libya (and our helping of others to bomb Libya) in 2011, much was made about how we were not going to get involved in Libya. There would be “no boots on the ground” and that would be safer. When Moammar Gaddafi was overthrown, we were told the effort in Libya was a success.
But on Wednesday, in her appearance before Congress,
“[Secretary of State] Clinton said the instability [in north Africa] has been fuelled by a flow of weapons from several countries in the region, particularly post-revolutionary Libya after Muammar Gaddafi's well stocked armouries were looted.
‘This Pandora's box of weapons coming out of these countries in the Middle East and north Africa is the source of one of our biggest threats. There's no doubt that the Algerian terrorists had weapons from Libya. There's no doubt that the Malian remnants of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has weapons from Libya. We have to do a much better job,’ she said.”
In other words, our lack of follow-through in Libya and our failure to foresee what could happen to Colonel Gaddafi’s stores of arms if they were not secured is at least one of the reasons the jihadists in North Africa are so dangerous now. It looks like, instead of being a success, our operations in Libya may have caused more problems than they solved.
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