Karma and Hillary Clinton

Somehow I doubt that Hillary Clinton is the type of introspective person who looks back at her mistakes and sees the lives that were ruined by them. Instead, Hillary is the type of person who obsessively reorders her enemies list and plots revenge on all of them (and their little dog, too). I have my own candidate for Hillary's worst decision - the overthrow of Libya.

During the Arab Spring there was widespread rioting across several Muslim countries. One of them was Libya. In the middle of the unrest, Hillary met with some Muslim extremists who convinced her that they could pick up the pieces if we helped overthrow Gaddafi's regime. President Obama was ambivalent and Vice President Biden was against it. Hillary was the one who convinced Obama that we should act. They used the excuse that we were protecting women and children but they knew it was a lie. We were actually protecting (male) Muslim extremists. Obama's actions were illegal. He didn't bother to consult with Congress or report to them within 30 days as required by law.

Democrats (and many Republicans) love to complain about Bush's wars but he got Congressional approval first and he had much better cause. Afghanistan was protecting Osama Bin Laden and we had been engaged in a low-level shooting war with Iraq for a decade. In contrast, Gaddafi had voluntarily given up his nuclear program with the understanding that he would be safe from US intervention. But Obama, at Hillary's urging, helped overthrow him anyway.

The people Hillary met with didn't live up to their promises. They were not able to create government. Libya descended into failed state status. Thousands died. There are slave markets in Libya now. This should be a black mark on Obama's and Hillary's record but it isn't because it's too easy to ignore. Where Bush followed the "you broke it, you bought it" rule and stayed to rebuild the countries he destabilized, Obama left Libya to the international community. Unsurprisingly, no other nations were willing to take over nation-building after we washed out hands of the matter. When asked about Libya late in his presidency, Obama said that he had expected more from them and that they disappointed him. That appears to be the extent of his and Hillary's regrets - that no one cleaned up their mess.

But, in a rare example of karma, this decision cost Hillary the presidency.

When we overthrew Gaddafi, that scared the bejesus out of Putin. He has sure that he would be next and he correctly blamed Hillary. That's one reason Russia interfered in the 2016 election. It was not to help Trump, it was to hurt Hillary. So, to whatever extent Russian email hacks, Wikileaks and Twitterbots affected the election, that was why they did (to be fair, Putin was also just doing it to show that he could).

But that's not the only affect Libya had on Hillary. The destabilization of Libya led to the deaths at Benghazi. That led to numerous Congressional investigations of Hillary's role in the deaths. The last of the investigations noticed that there were very few emails from Hillary. They asked why and were told that she had a private email server and hadn't turned over the contents to the National Archives as required. And that launched the FBI investigation. Until then, no one cared that she'd used a private server but once the news got out, it had to be investigated. And that also led to the discovery that her assistant, Huma, had been forwarding emails to her husband, Anthony Weiner, who was being investigated for child pornography.

Hillary constantly complains about having to run against Trump, Russia and the Director of the FBI but if we'd left Libya alone, Russia and the FBI would never have been involved. Karma's a bitch.

Of course that still would have left her with a lackluster campaign.