Forget whether present day Libya is worse or better than present day Syria. I doubt either of us have the knowledge to really make a good case one way or the other. My point is that you seem to expect that if the US had not intervened in Libya, that Libya (and the Middle East) would be a better, more stable place and that assumption is hypothetical at best and naive at worst. Would a Libya with Kaddafi in power that is in civil war like Syria with Sadat be a better place? That seems to be the most logical alternative if the US had not intervened and Kaddafi has managed to stay in power. I suppose it is possible that Kaddafi could have won the civil war. Its really hard to say one way or the other.
It's Assad. Anwar Sadat was Egyptian and died in 1981.
Yeah, my bad on that one. I got in a hurry and my hands were typing faster than my brain in regards to Middle East leader names and personalities.
I'll sum this up by saying that when the US spends money and risks lives to intervene in a country, it should make things better there. I agree that Libya might still be in a civil war if we hadn't intervened, just as you learned it is in reality this morning. If the best you can say about the war against Libya is that it didn't accomplish anything, I count that as a failure.
For Libya as a whole, I count it more as NOT a success than a failure. Libya was likely an unwinnable situation. I do agree that what happened in Benghazi was a failure in that there should have been better security and was foreseeable in that requests for extra security were made but didn't happen.
Okay, you hold Clinton's vote against her in 2003, placing blame for the Iraq War and the situations leading to ISIS on her shoulders. I guess EVERYONE who supported that war also hold the blame as well.
Certainly every legislator who voted for it does.
Not just the legislators, but every citizen who supported toppling Hussein. Ultimately those legislators were responding to the public will, which according to some estimates was 60% in favor at one time or another prior to the invasion. If there had been sufficient numbers against it, the war likely wouldn't have happened. Of the candidates, I think only a handful say that they didn't support Iraq invasion at the time.
You are being unreasonable if you blame a person for failing to fill a hole the size of a grand canyon with a shovel in the matter of six years. The problems in the Middle East are the combined results of over a century of failed policy decisions, starting with colonial imperialism and the countries that were created by colonial powers. Current day problems usually amount to no-win situations in which you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. In any given situation, non-intervention can be just as equally or more wrong than intervening. Or vice versa. To mix metaphors, its a damned minefield that like it or not we have to traverse and in terms of experience I think Clinton is one of the better (if not best) candidates among those we have available to navigate that minefield.
So it's impossible for anybody to know what to do, and we shouldn't hold government officials to any standard of performance. What's the point of picking the most experienced person, then?
A standard of performance, YES.
YOUR apparent standard of performance, NO.
To use another metaphor, you seem to want to grade a test with an unsolvable question worth ten points and deduct the full ten points for not having a correct answer. The method of grading then, should not be so much whether the answer is correct - because that is impossible. To be fair to the student you would need to use other criteria, probably grading based upon how well the answer communicates the students understanding of primary concepts contained within the question.
The metaphor I've described is obviously limited in its applicability to the real question at hand - judging an administration's foreign policy. I don't pretend to have all the answers in how best to judge foreign policy. Some of it is admittedly gut emotion. For instance, I judge the Iraq War as failed foreign policy based on the follow reasons:
1. Iraq posed no immediate threat to the US nor US interests
2. The US toppled a stable government and replaced it with an unstable government that is still unstable 13 years later
When trying to judge the foreign policy in Libya, it is more difficult for me. Libya was already unstable. It is difficult to screw up something that is already screwed up. At the time, I thought the Libya intervention was the right thing to do. It obviously didn't turn out so well and I can see why you would consider it a failure. My sympathy towards supporting people wanting to be free and human rights in general when it comes to a situation that is already FUBAR makes me a less non-interventionist, I suppose.
Now, a harsh realpolitik judgement criteria might be the following.
1. Was U.S. interests at stake? (not really for Libya, as far as I know)
2. Did policy make a situation more or less stable? (arguably less, but ultimately not really knowable)
Others who are more humanitarian might include criteria such as:
3. Did the U.S. act to promote humanitarian principles? (for Libya, yes)
I think it was the humanitarian question that ultimately tipped the balance for the US deciding to intervene in Libya. Thus even if it was a failure, I think it was a reasonable choice to make in a no-win situation.
So for all your criticism of Clinton, who among the other candidate is your preferred alternative to handle the foreign policy troubles in general and the Middle East specifically?
I think Rand Paul would mostly stay out of things, but he obviously isn't going to win the nomination, and he's not a great candidate for other reasons (no executive experience, appears to be a simply unpleasant person). I'm very disappointed in the 2016 field and it gives me a lot of trepidation. I have nobody to hold up and say "this person has the answer." But that doesn't justify pretending that Hillary Clinton was a successful Secretary of State.
You accuse me of presenting strawmen, but continue to repeat one yourself. I never offered judgement that Clinton was a successful Secretary of State.
If you go back and read the thread, I merely countered your own initial reply in which you claimed that her foreign policy experience was that of failure. I have offered several examples of her successes. Some of those examples you have even agreed were successes. Thus, we should both agree that her foreign policy experience is associated with failures AND successes. The degree of which one way or the other is an argument that I really don't want to wade into and probably neither of us are really qualified to make.
In addition, I have repeated that in terms of judging her as a candidate for President in the area of foreign policy, one needs to judge her in relation to the other candidates, their foreign policy experiences and positions. That fact that you can't find a candidate that you actually like, does NOT invalidate that comparison and my own conclusion that Clinton is one of the best among the candidates, and probably THE best among the likely nominees, in terms of foreign policy experience and positions, particularly for a person who is a non-interventionist.
Thus even though you seem to not like Clinton, she is possibly the best of a bad set of alternatives.