All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
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All right, you guys, on the line, it's the great Doug Bondo, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, regular writer for the American Conservative Magazine and the National Interest.
This one is at TAC.
It's called The Obama Administration Wrecked Libya for a Generation.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
How are you, sir?
Happy to be on.
Very happy to have you here.
And you know, I got to say, it's a true thing.
Somebody I know, a grown adult, I'd say more educated than me, at least officially, said these words to me, quote, we had a war in Libya?
The year 2011.
You know what?
Maybe he was really busy that year on a special project.
I'm not sure.
But I think a lot of people don't know the first thing about it, Doug, so why don't you tell us all about it?
Well, at the time of the kind of Arab Spring, Libya was one of those countries.
And an opposition developed to Muammar Gaddafi, a longtime dictator there.
And the U.S. decided to get involved, the U.S. and the Europeans, in the name of protecting civilians.
And of course, it basically became regime change on the cheap, which was bomb Muammar Gaddafi over time and figure that after a few months, the other guys will take him out, and they did.
And that was nine years ago.
And this is a place that's still convulsed by violence.
They've had ISIS and others have been involved, loose weapons all over.
And the extraordinary thing here is this is a guy who back in 2003 agreed to the U.S. and the Europeans that he would give up his nuclear and missile programs.
So the idea was, this is the guy who's going to make the deal we keep offering to the North Koreans and to the Iranians and whatnot, and he took the deal.
And you can find out his end on YouTube, that he was captured by the insurgents, and let's just say he met a very unpleasant end.
And any current dictator looks at that and is going to say, are you out of your mind?
You want me to do what?
No, very, very huge, huge problem there.
No one thought this through.
Now, one of the most important parts of how the war started, of course, was the argument that Gaddafi's forces were on their way to kill every last man, woman and child in the city of Benghazi in eastern Libya.
In Obama's speech, he said, this is a city the size of Charlotte.
And can you imagine the carnage if everyone in Charlotte was killed?
That's what we're trying to stop here.
So what about that, Doug?
We're supposed to let something like that happen?
Well, it turned out to be basically a complete fake.
He gave a speech about Benghazi and what he did is he threatened those who'd taken up arms against him.
And people took that speech and said, see, this is what he's threatening people.
He's going to kill all the civilians.
He was a bad dude, but he'd taken back several cities on the way and not slaughtered anyone.
I mean, this is not in his interest to do so.
He had no interest in doing that.
I mean, this is one of those things where it became the great excuse, the question of how do you sell intervention to say, I have a great idea, let's get involved and change dictators.
You know, how many Americans want to get involved in that?
But you say we want to get in there and save lives.
That sounds a lot better.
It was also used to try to basically bring along the Chinese and the Russians.
To have a U.N. approved intervention requires that they accept that.
Otherwise, you can't get it through the Security Council.
So the presentation was we will only be getting involved to protect civilians.
But of course, that was not the case.
Once the resolution was passed, U.S. and Europeans got involved.
We just bombed the Qaddafi side.
And it was very clear that for the allies, this became regime change on the cheap.
This is great.
We can take him out.
Fabulous.
You know, the Libyans do most of the work, but we take out some of his forces and make it easier for them.
Well, so what do you think were the real reasons for the war, Doug?
Oh, look, I think that there is...
Washington cannot imagine the world without them manipulating everything.
And I think this became a matter of convenience, where Qaddafi is weak and suddenly, I mean, especially...
This was pushed very hard by Hillary Clinton, I think much more than Barack Obama.
He tended to be more, I think, cautious on these things.
You know, look, she's the war queen.
I think that's what Tulsi Gabbard called her.
I mean, Hillary Clinton's kind of the Democratic neocon.
She was really into this stuff.
This is America's opportunity to kind of transform.
This is social engineering.
I think you have people in Washington whose view is they can make the world a much better place and if that means killing a lot of people along the way, you know, it's too bad, but that has to be done.
I mean, really creepy is the YouTube...
You can go onto YouTube and look at the interview that she gave after he was killed, where the interviewer says, you know, kind of essentially, what about Qaddafi and this and that?
And she says, oh yeah, we came, we saw, he died, ha, ha, ha.
And it's just very creepy where, you know, he was a bad dude.
I mean, I don't mourn him being gone, but to have a U.S. official in this very kind of weird celebration of having taken somebody out who died in a fairly gruesome way.
And then especially given what's happened, which is, you know, Libyans continue to die today.
The Civil War goes on.
You know, people have been slaughtered by ISIS.
I mean, all this stuff is an outgrowth of American policy.
It's hard to see how the Libyans are better off of having, you know, eight years of Civil War, nine years of Civil War, you know, what was supposed to become a fairly quick move to democracy.
Well, and one thing, too, was, and we knew this from the beginning, the best reporters were pointing it out from the very beginning, that the revolution on the ground was led by the Libyan veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The guys who had fought with Zarqawi and the Sunni-based insurgency against the Americans at that time, the war that hadn't quite all the way wrapped up yet, right?
We didn't even get the last of our troops out until December 2011.
Yet, so for this whole war, we got guys who are still, you know, doing drone strikes and special ops strikes against al-Qaeda in Iraq, whatever's left of them, in Western Iraq.
At the same time, we're taking their side on the ground in Libya, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia and all of these guys.
Well, less than two years before we took him out, John McCain and Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman were all having dinner with him in Tripoli, talking about giving him aid because he was so helpful fighting al-Qaeda.
And then less than two years later, they were all kind of doing the Maori Haka, demanding war, war, war.
And it shows the bizarreness here, where they were there sucking up to him.
They were talking about whether or not the U.S. could rehabilitate the C-5As and stuff that, you know, planes that he was there when he took power but had never been, you know, kind of upgraded because he'd been on a bad list, if now that could be rectified.
And they were talking in those terms.
They were very happy because he was fighting al-Qaeda.
Yeah, but then the moment they had to kind of play social engineering, isn't this wonderful, they moved to take him out.
And then you look at what's happened since.
Yeah, well, it really goes to show a big part of their motive there for those three most important hawks in the U.S. Senate, just like Sarkozy in France, the embarrassment of their previous cozy relationship.
Yep.
Yep.
That's right.
Yeah.
So now let's talk about a little bit of the chaos since then.
Do you know much about this guy Haftar?
And can you describe a little bit about his war of, I guess, his forces in the east of the country versus the more Islamist government and the coalition government in Tripoli?
Well, Libya has always been divided geographically.
I mean, a lot of these countries are rather artificial.
You know, it was a colony, it was put together.
So these things, in many ways, aren't very unified.
And Gaddafi kept it all together.
He balanced tribes and interest groups.
I mean, you know, it wasn't really easy being a dictator in a case like that.
Haftar is a former general under Gaddafi, actually went to the U.S. in exile, worked for the CIA, became an American citizen, so he's a dual citizen, and then went back to Libya and is basically taking on what is kind of internationally recognized as legitimate government, but it has a lot more Islamist types within it.
And it's defended by a bunch of different militias and stuff.
I mean, you look at this, kind of what we did in Syria, of course, is our friends are not necessarily our friends.
We keep some very odd company in these cases.
And neither side seems to be able to kill off the other one.
You know, they're both reasonably balanced, and the point is, it's really hard to take the offensive and whatnot.
So this is the driving force of the war right now.
He launched an offensive last year, he wanted to take Tripoli, and everybody's been kind of getting involved, where you basically have the Russians have helped him, now the Turks are getting involved to help the government in Tripoli, you have the Saudis, and the UAE are involved there, I think the Qataris are on the side of Haftar.
So this is becoming just an incredible mess of others jumping in, and again, this is an outgrowth.
If you look back and say, this is insane, why would you want to trigger this sort of stuff?
Nobody had any idea what they were doing.
So we've turned this into a magnet for international intervention.
And the people who are suffering, of course, are average Libyans, who are the people caught in the crossfire.
By the way, so does this represent a major change in Erdogan's overall foreign policy in sending troops to, I mean, in other words, he sent troops to Qatar to prevent a conflict with Saudi Arabia, I think a year ago or so.
But this seems more likely to make things worse.
Well, I think that's right.
This is clearly an effort to expand his influence.
I think this is much closer to what he's been doing in Syria, which is, you know, getting involved to try to push kind of his agenda, you know, push Turkey's influence out there.
Getting involved in Qatar expanded his influence, but it expanded it in a sense in a positive way.
I mean, this is aggression from a really awful state that is, you know, Saudi Arabia.
Here, I mean, the problem is choosing between the regime in Tripoli and after, I mean, no sane person really should want to get in the middle of that.
It's not like either of these are regimes you feel very good dealing with.
But I think for him, he's talking about putting troops in directly.
It's hard to imagine that's going to end well for Turkey.
I mean, they're going to become targets.
Some of these people are going to die.
He's going to be right in the middle of a fight.
You've got the, your Russians have put in mercenaries, you know, Qatar puts in a lot of money and this is a really messy situation.
Yeah.
We got to mention about how this war spread right into Mali back in 2012 and 13 as spread crisis all through the Sahel from there, nevermind on to Syria and that whole part of it.
Well, that's the thing.
This is, the countries in that region are all very weak.
I mean, virtually none of these have a serious solid government, you know, a political structure that's holds together a military that works well.
So when you, when you blow something like Libya up and it kind of, it just spreads the virus and if you know that the surrounding countries all suffer.
Yeah.
And now, by the way, so going back to the nineties, one of the reasons that the Bin Ladenites targeted us was for support of dictatorships similar to Qaddafi's in any case.
For example, Mubarak in Egypt or King Fahd in Saudi.
So I'm pretty sure that you would also not recommend that, but certainly we should probably not be going ahead and supporting the jihadists against them.
Is that right?
Oh, that's right.
I mean, yeah, I mean, you, you go to Syria and you say, we don't like Assad, so let's work with the Al Qaeda affiliate.
And you sit there and you just shake your head because Al Qaeda of course are the folks who attacked us.
So we're going to work with those people because we actually think that the other guys are worse.
I mean, this is, why would you want to inflame this stuff?
I mean, you just see getting involved never ends well.
I mean, you're hitting the hornet's nest and somebody's going to sting you.
And I think that in the longterm, I mean, getting involved, for example, in Yemen, it's hard for me to believe there won't at some point be Yemeni terrorists are going to attack because they remember, they saw the bombs, you know, that had, you know, kind of the debris and they saw the unexploded ordnance that have American signs on them.
They know who was supporting the Saudis and killed their families and friends.
This stuff is, it is not in America's interest to jump in the middle of this stuff.
Yeah.
Boy, and the one in Yemen, you're talking about 10,000 times the level of violence of Libya, as bad as that is.
Exactly.
It's horrendous.
It's absolutely horrendous.
It's something that, I mean, Americans should, I mean, feel absolutely ashamed of.
And of course, virtually none of them know that it's occurring.
Yeah.
All right, you guys, that's the great Doug Bondo.
He is senior fellow at the Cato Institute and he's got these great pieces recently at the American Conservative.
The Obama administration wrecked Libya for a generation.
And the latest here is note to Trump, Iraq is not a U.S. colony.
Thank you very much for your time, Doug.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
