The usual suspects are attacking Bernie Sanders as a lightweight on foreign policy, but let’s hit the pause button and consider the words of a scholar rather than hot-take-journalist hacks. From Dr. Jeff Sachs:
Hillary has been much attacked for the deaths of US diplomats in Benghazi, but her tireless promotion of the overthrow Muammar Qaddafi by NATO bombing is the far graver disaster. Hillary strongly promoted NATO-led regime change in Libya, not only in violation of international law but counter to the most basic good judgment. After the NATO bombing, Libya descended into civil war while the paramilitaries and unsecured arms stashes in Libya quickly spread west across the African Sahel and east to Syria. The Libyan disaster has spawned war in Mali, fed weapons to Boko Haram in Nigeria, and fueled ISIS in Syria and Iraq. In the meantime, Hillary found it hilarious to declare of Qaddafi: "We came, we saw, he died."
I think it’s fine to engage in some black humor at the expense of a horrible dictator who tortured and oppressed his own people — in private. But, Hillary thought it was appropriate to gloat and laugh on TV. In case you missed it!
Does this kind of behavior ring a bell? Hmmm, maybe we need some Beach Boys! Or, well, John McCain pretending he’s one of them!
Foreign policy is serious business. Regime change — which the United States has failed at executing in Vietnam, Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, Brazil, Iraq and many, many countries — is really hard and destroys a lot of people’s lives, kills people, even in those extremely rare cases where it is relatively successful. It is not something to joke about on national television.
In the case of Libya, Hillary’s pet project, BuzzFeed came out with a scary report yesterday about just how much ground ISIS — the same ISIS that came to exist as a result of the tragic Iraq War and regime change for which Hillary voted — has gained in recent months. Life there is a living hell.
On the ground, Libya is the ultimate failed state; electricity sputters in and out every few hours, running water frequently shuts off, and schools and hospitals bleed staff abroad, as medics join the tens of thousands sheltering in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Unless, of course, you’re ISIS.
Into this mess, Islamist extremists started to seize territory, gathering strength and eventually coalescing to form the Libyan branch of ISIS, which declared itself in late 2015, and has since consolidated its power in Benghazi, Derna, Sirte, and Bin Jawad. Foreign fighters have joined them, swelling ISIS’s ranks to 5,000, with Libya providing an alternative destination for recruits unable to make their way to Syria or Iraq. They are drawn by Libya’s lawlessness and the world’s largest supply of loose weapons, a result of the bungled failure to secure the country after Qaddafi’s death.
The reality is that the U.S. is a military empire in decline. When a country faces relative decline — note the warmongering rhetoric of people like Ted Cruz, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio — pressure to engage in military action only increases. Given where the U.S. stands in global history, we need a sober adult — like Barack Obama — leading our foreign policy in the years to come, not a hot-headed warmonger like John McCain or Hillary Clinton or Ted “carpet bomb” Cruz.
No, Hillary is not strong on foreign policy — she is an ongoing nightmare. This is not hyperbole.
If we choose Hillary as our nominee, we don’t get Barack Obama’s cautious view of a complicated and challenging new multi-polar world, we get John “bomb, bomb Iran” McCain.
Is Bernie really the weaker of the two candidates when it comes to foreign policy? Who is the riskier choice?
Again, Dr. Sachs says it best.
It is hard to know the roots of this record of disaster. Is it chronically bad judgment? Is it her preternatural faith in the lying machine of the CIA? Is it a repeated attempt to show that as a Democrat she would be more hawkish than the Republicans? Is it to satisfy her hardline campaign financiers? Who knows? Maybe it's all of the above. But whatever the reasons, hers is a record of disaster. Perhaps more than any other person, Hillary can lay claim to having stoked the violence that stretches from West Africa to Central Asia and that threatens US security.