Special to WorldTribune.com

“Smart power at its best.”

That’s what Clinton calls the failed U.S. intervention she led that has turned into an enormous catastrophe for the people of Libya.

“Gov. Webb has said that he would never have used military force in Libya and that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was inevitable,” CNN moderator Anderson Cooper told the former secretary of state during the Oct. 13 Democratic presidential primary debate. “Should you have seen that attack coming?”

Clinton’s answer: “Remember what was going on. We had a murderous dictator, Gadhafi, who had American blood on his hands … threatening to massacre large numbers of the Libyan people. We had our closest allies in Europe burning up the phone lines begging us to help them try to prevent what they saw as a mass genocide, in their words. And we had the Arabs standing by our side saying, ‘we want you to help us deal with (Moammar) Gadhafi.’ ”

Several intelligence officials and leaders of human rights groups have doubted Clinton’s explanation since the day she gave it.

“I’ll say this for the Libyan people…” Clinton added. “I think President Obama made the right decision at the time. And the Libyan people had a free election the first time since 1951. And you know what, they voted for moderates, they voted with the hope of democracy. Because of the Arab Spring, because of a lot of other things, there was turmoil to be followed.”

One of Clinton’s closest advisers at the State Department had said in an email that “HRC has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations, at NATO, and in contact group meetings — as well as the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Gadhafi and his regime.”

The actual aftermath of Clinton’s war has seen the so-called elected government splintered into opposing factions, militias controlling wide swathes of territory and Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) butchering Christians and capturing a key city.

“Libya today — it’s much, much worse,” Karim Mezran, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, told Frontline. “Criminality is skyrocketing. Insecurity is pervasive. There are no jobs. It’s hard to get food and electricity. There’s fighting, there’s fear … I see very few bright spots.”

​Libya expert Frederic Wehrey reported in Defense One that “nearly three and a half years after Libyan rebels and a NATO air campaign overthrew Gadhafi, the cohesive political entity known as Libya doesn’t exist.”

Some even say that Hillary Clinton’s war in Libya has made Americans less safe.

“Death and civil war in Libya were unacceptable outcomes for America when Gadhafi was alive,” writes Michael Brendan Doughterty of TheWeek.com.

“But death and civil war continue unabated, the difference being that the Islamic State is now one of the players — and somehow it’s not in the American interest to stop it or to help Libyans establish some kind of law and order. The lessons of Iraq have been internalized: Once you create a total power vacuum that will attract terror gangs and radical Islamic fundamentalists, it’s best to not have any boots on the ground to stop them.”

  At debate, Democratic primary debate, Hillary defense of failed war in Libya went unchallenged at debate, Moammar Gadhafi, WorldTribune.com