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Rubio Campaign Press Release - Wondering What Marco Rubio's Record Is on Libya, Another Example of Hillary Clinton's Failed Leadership? Read Up Here

January 01, 2016

SPANGDAHLEM AIR BASE, Germany A C-130J Super Hercules from the 37th Airlift Squadron, Ramstein Air Base, Germany, waits to be loaded with cargo here in support of Operation Odyssey Dawn March 21. Joint Task Force Odyssey Dawn is the U.S. Africa Command task force established to provide operational and tactical command and control of U.S. military forces supporting the international response to the unrest in Libya and enforcement of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1973. UNSCR 1973 authorizes all necessary measures to protect civilians in Libya under threat of attack by Qadhafi regime forces. JTF Odyssey Dawn is commanded by U.S. Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear, III. (U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Nathanael Callon)

There is no question that Libya, after the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, is today a failed state and a haven for Islamic extremism.

What you may not know, though, is that Marco Rubio warned that Libya would suffer such a fate when the Obama Administration decided to belatedly "lead from behind" in toppling the Qaddafi regime, rather than taking a leading role in helping the Libyan people.

When the Libyan people rose up against Moammar Qaddafi, a brutal dictator with a history of supporting terrorism against the U.S. and Israel and horrific abuses against his own countrymen, the country was dissolving into civil war.

The only question was whether the West — the U.S. and its NATO allies — would be there to protect the Libyan people by ending the violence quickly, fight Islamic extremism, and support the Libyans' efforts to build a new stable, inclusive government.

For months, the Obama Administration and Hillary Clinton dithered — Libya, in fact, is the conflict where they boasted they were "leading from behind."

Here's what Marco told The Weekly Standard in March 2011, when the Obama Administration was slowly coming to back our European allies' plans for intervention:

The administration is complicating matters with phony multilateralism, [Marco said.] "This idea that we're turning this over to NATO is quite frankly humorous. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad because we are NATO. And that needs to be confronted and that needs to be handled.

In June, Marco wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Congress needed to strengthen President Obama's efforts in Libya — not tie his hands as some Republicans wanted, which would have prolonged the conflict even longer and led to more violence and anarchy and undermined America's standing in the region with our NATO and Arab partners and allowed our enemies to believe that an American President's word was meaningless.

But once Qaddafi was toppled that autumn, President Obama and Hillary Clinton failed to provide the support that was needed to help the Libyan people rebuild their country. That challenge was all the greater because their reluctance to back the Libyan people prolonged the conflict.  

Here's what Marco told Fox News in October, after Qaddafi was killed:

A lot of infrastructure has been destroyed in Libya that has to all be rebuilt; 30 some odd militias have now formed. It's going to be a bear to get them to disarm. You have a lot of young men who instead of entering the workforce and rebuilding the country are now young men that need medical rehab, prosthetics because they have been injured in war.

The cost of rebuilding the country has gotten exponentially high. If the United States had just gotten engaged a little bit earlier and a little bit more aggressively, what happened last week would have happened months ago and it would have cost a lot less money, there would have been a lot less uncertainty. Here is what else happened over the last eight months: Thousands of shoulder-fired rockets have gone missing, and now these rockets are out there capable of shooting down an airplane and we don't know where they're. . . .

If the rebels had had a no-fly zone when they asked for it, this thing would have been over in a week. . . .

NATO has limited capabilities. The British and the French, they worked very hard; they did a very good job. But they don't have the weaponry we have. If we had just stayed in that effort a little bit longer, this thing would have ended sooner as well.

That same month, following a visit to Libya, Marco underscored the need for the United States to maintain its commitment to aiding a post-Gaddafi Libya:

We can also help Libya lay the foundation for sustainable security. This requires safeguarding the immense stockpiles of weapons and dangerous materials that exist across the country. It also requires bringing Libya's many militias under the TNC's civilian authority, and working toward their demobilization, disarmament and reintegration into Libyan society. We and our allies should encourage this peaceful process as much as we can, and oppose external efforts to pick winners who would advance factional or ideological interests through force... American support is also important for Libya's democratic transition. The TNC wants to cooperate with the U.S., especially with our nongovernmental organizations, in the monitoring of national elections (which could be held soon), the drafting of a constitution, and the development of civil society.

As the Benghazi Commission and other investigations have shown, despite the chaos the Obama/Clinton intervention left behind, Secretary Clinton and the Obama administration essentially abandoned Libya.  They did little to help the nascent moderate Libyan government dissolve the militias and build cohesive security forces. They ignored the growing chaos in Libya, so much so that repeated threats to our personnel in the country, including in Benghazi, went unheeded.

The results were the attacks on our facilities on September 11, 2012, which left four Americans dead and eventually forced U.S. personnel to leave the country entirely.

As Marco pointed out in October 2015 in a Breitbart piece, the Obama Administration's desire to have a "light footprint" is what's allowed terrorists to flourish in Libya — including the ones who killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi.

As the Libyan government was left on its own, so too were our personnel in Libya.

Ambassador Stevens and his team requested additional security personnel from State Department headquarters on multiple occasions, only to have the requests denied. Clinton now claims that these decisions were made by her subordinates, but given her role in crafting the administration's policy toward Libya, she should have been more engaged, both before and in the middle of the worst attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in decades.

This disengagement from a major crisis facing her Department is symptomatic of her broader approach to her role as Secretary of State. Indeed, she really has no major accomplishment to point to from her four years as Secretary of State and the issues on which she engaged the most often had the most disastrous results for U.S. foreign policy.

Now, as Marco has repeatedly warned, Libya is in such chaos that it is now the premier operating area for ISIS outside of Syria and Iraq.

When Qaddafi, an anti-American dictator who had the blood of Americans and Israelis on his hands, was falling, it was a no-brainer for the United States to help the Libyan people take him down.

But then President Obama and Hillary Clinton squandered the opportunity that presented. Reluctant to lead, they were slow to provide American help, and then failed to continue the support after Qaddafi's fall.

The costs of restoring Libya to stability now will be much, much greater than they would have been if America had offered more than the kind of half-hearted, politically minded intervention that has characterized the Obama-Clinton foreign policy.

Marco Rubio, Rubio Campaign Press Release - Wondering What Marco Rubio's Record Is on Libya, Another Example of Hillary Clinton's Failed Leadership? Read Up Here Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/325989

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