Strategy? The Democrats Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Strategy!

President Obama has admitted that he doesn’t have a “complete strategy” to deal with ISIS. Not to worry, though: it isn’t his fault. But I don’t understand what that even means. What, exactly, is an “incomplete strategy”? Whatever it is, Michael Ramirez doesn’t think much of it. Click to enlarge:

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But it isn’t just Barack Obama. The same inexplicable failure to develop a strategy afflicts Hillary Clinton. As I wrote here, Hillary’s real Benghazi problem isn’t only the death of four Americans in a terrorist attack. Rather, it is “the broader issue of Libya.”

Why were Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans murdered? Because by September 2012, Libya was a terrorist playground. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Libya has become a failed state, a 21st century source of boat people, as refugees from ubiquitous violence stream across the Mediterranean. Libya is now a haven for ISIS and other terrorist groups; it was on the Libyan coast that ISIS beheaded 30 Christians. Some of the “refugees” now making their way into Europe are, in fact, ISIS agents. In short, Libya is a disaster.

Whose disaster? Hillary Clinton’s. It was Hillary who, more than anyone else, pushed to overthrow Moammar Qaddafi. Why? No compelling reason. Qaddafi had been tame ever since the Iraq war, which he interpreted as a threat to his rule. Almost incredibly, Clinton and her cohorts in NATO overthrew Qaddafi (who was subsequently murdered by a mob) without having a plan for what would come next.

If you wait long enough, the “mainstream” media sometimes catch on. Today CNN weighed in with “Hillary Clinton’s real Libya problem.” CNN’s reporter, Stephen Collinson, sounds like he read my post. He quotes the same April 2012 email by aide Jake Sullivan that I did, and draws the same conclusion:

Clinton has little choice but to own what happened in Libya. An email to Clinton in April 2012 from her former top adviser Jake Sullivan, released last month, appears to show that initially her aides were keen to trumpet her role in the intervention and saw it as legacy-enhancing.

The fundamental problem is that Hillary led the effort to overthrow Qaddafi for no particular reason, with no plan for what would happen after:

So Clinton must be ready to explain why she backed a military operation in a region laced with extremism without effective planning for the aftermath. …

Clinton’s campaign declined to comment for this story, so it is unclear whether what happened in Libya after Gadhafi fell has changed her thinking on military intervention.

If Hillary has her way, it will be unclear right up to November 2016. She has no intention of answering anyone’s questions, not even from friendly outlets like CNN.

There is a unifying theme here: Democrats, confronted as always by a world filled with hazards and threats, are incapable of devising a coherent strategy for dealing with them, and seemingly don’t even try to do so. The charitable explanation is that they are incompetent. But perhaps it is because they aren’t sure what their desired ends are. Do they want the U.S. to win? Do they want us to be powerful, prosperous, influential and successful? That is not a hard question for most Americans, but it is for leading Democrats like Obama and Clinton. If you don’t know the answer to that question, then coming up with a strategy is tough. That, I suspect, is what we have seen for the last six or seven years.

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