At the time, the Gadhafi regime was fighting a civil war that grew out of the Arab Spring, battling Islamist-backed rebels who wanted to dethrone the longtime dictator.
Mrs. Clinton argued that
Gadhafi might engage in genocide and create a humanitarian crisis and ultimately persuaded President Obama,
NATO allies and the
United Nations to authorize military intervention.
Gadhafi’s son and heir apparent,
Seif Gadhafi, told American officials in the secret conversations that he was worried
Mrs. Clinton was using false pretenses to justify unseating his father and insisted that the regime had no intention of harming a mass of civilians. He compared
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for war to that of the George W. Bush administration’s now debunked weapons of mass destruction accusations, which were used to lobby Congress to invade
Iraq, the tapes show.
“It was like the WMDs in
Iraq. It was based on a false report,”
Gadhafi said in a May 2011 phone call to
Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, an Ohio Democrat serving at the time. “Libyan airplanes bombing demonstrators, Libyan airplanes bombing districts in
Tripoli, Libyan army killed thousands, etc., etc., and now the whole world found there is no single evidence that such things happened in
Libya.”
Seif Gadhafi also warned that many of the U.S.-supported armed rebels were “not freedom fighters” but rather jihadists whom he described as “gangsters and terrorists.”
