Clinton Refuses to Say If Libyan Intervention Was a Mistake

CLINTON: "Let me make two points. One, let’s remember what was going on at the time, the height of the Arab Spring. The people in Libya were expressing themselves, were demanding their freedom and Gaddafi responded brutally and said that he would just hunt them down like cockroaches and made it very clear he would use his mercenaries because he didn’t have a standing army, he had a lot of hired mercenaries from around to do literally that. The Europeans who are across the sea from Libya, you know, came to us and said, this is on our doorstep, we need your help. Basically they said, we’re with you in Afghanistan, we need you now to help us with Libya because we’ve got to prevent this terrible happening that could result from Gaddafi. We had Arabs come to us and say the same thing. We formed the first coalition between NATO and a Arab nations. Arab nations actually ran a lot of the air campaign and other support systems. So I think you have to look at what was going on at the time and why it seemed, and I agree with this, to make sense for us to bring our special assets to the table to help the people of Libya. Now, I go back to this point, they had an election and it was a good election. It was a fair election. It met international standards. That was an amazing accomplishment for a nation that had been so deprived for so long. You know, the United States was in Korea and still is for many years. We are still in Germany. We are still in Japan. We have a presence in a lot of places in the world that started out as a result of conflict. And if you think about South Korea, there were coups, assassinations, a lot of problems for the Koreans to build their economy, create their democracy. This doesn’t happen overnight. Yes, it’s been a couple of years. I think it’s worth European support, Arab support, American support to try to help the Libyan people realize the dream they had when they went after Gaddafi."