Monday during a MSNBC town hall, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton discussed the push for regime change in Libya while she served was secretary of state.
Clinton acknowledged the outcome wasn’t “perfect,” but touted the elections, which were an improvement from the former dictator, Muammar Gaddafi.
“Is Libya perfect?” Clinton said. “It isn’t. But did they have two elections that were fair where they voted for moderates? Yes they did. Changing from a dictator that has hollowed out your country to something resembling a functioning state and even hopefully more of a democratic one doesn’t happen overnight.”
Clinton went on to make the extraordinary claim to “Hardball” host Chris Matthews the United States “didn’t lose a single person” in Libya, despite the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.
“You see what’s happening in Syria with the consequence of millions of people flooding out of Syria, with more than 250,000 people killed, with terrorist groups like ISIS taking up a huge swath of territory as big as some of the states in that area,” Clinton said. “So yes, Libya was a different kind of calculation and we didn’t lose a single person.”
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