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The two-part New York Times examination of Hillary Clinton's role in the disastrous U.S. intervention against Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi includes a revealing sidebar featuring various people's opinions about what went wrong. A few of my favorites:Michael T. Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency:"This was a disaster. This was not a failure. It was a disaster.… We made it worse. All I know is that in Libya we took a guy out—again not a great guy—but a guy who maintained stability in a bad neighborhood."
Philip H. Gordon, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under Clinton: "I'm not among the people who thinks there was a magical way we could have done this right. The 'failure-to-follow-up' critique in particular drives me crazy because it implies that if we’d only paid attention, et cetera, everything would be O.K.…We gave the Libyans a chance. It turned out that they weren’t up to it—or maybe we weren’t up to it. Maybe it was just too hard."
David H. Petraeus, retired general and former CIA director: "It’s pretty easy in hindsight. In the wake of Qaddafi’s fall, we weren't quick enough to get in there and try to do something and actually have a meaningful contribution that could help secure and stabilize the situation.…It's very hard to say whether additional assets in a comprehensive manner would have been enough. But what we did was certainly not enough."
Derek Chollet, former State Department, National Security Council and Defense Department official: "When I looked at Libya, I thought, all right, we've got a small population, six million people, we have tremendous energy resources that had been underdeveloped, we had the international community that is extraordinarily unified and invested in Libya's success. I mean, this is the opposite of Iraq in every way. So by God, if we can't succeed here, it should really make one think about embarking on these kind of efforts."
Read more @: Clinton on Libya: 'Too Soon to Tell'; Everyone Else: 'This Was a Disaster'
Interventionism and imperialism leads to chaos. Nation building often times fails if the population is way too sectarianism or the imperialist/interventionist policy and or end game is not popular supported among the population. This is what we have often times been seeing in the past 30+ years of US imperialism.