President Barack Obama called the failure to adequately prepare for the aftermath of the ouster of former Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi the “worst mistake” of his eight years in the White House.
Though he held that intervening in Libya “was the right thing to do,” Obama said that his administration did not do enough to “plan for the day after” in a Fox News interview with Chris Wallace that aired on Sunday.
Libya dissolved into civil war in 2011 after Qaddafi aggressively quashed protests against his autocratic rule, prompting NATO forces to intervene and try to remove him from power. The country spiraled further into chaos after Qaddafi was captured and killed by anti-government militia members, with militant Islamist groups gaining power and rampant weapons proliferation.
The 2012 terrorist attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, in which the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed, has been a key source of GOP criticism against Obama and Hillary Clinton, who then served as secretary of state.
Clinton, the current Democratic presidential frontrunner, strongly encouraged the intervention. But she said at a March 7 town hall that what has happened in the country since the overthrow of Qaddafi is “deeply regrettable.”
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