She had to destroy Libya to save it.
Via Foreign Policy:
If Democrats prefer to tie the chaos in today’s Middle East, specifically the rise of the Islamic State, to the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, the Republican history of the Middle East seems to start with the inauguration of President Barack Obama and the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as his first secretary of state in January 2009. For the GOP, it was Clinton who let chaos and Islamic militants spread across the region because of her active support for the Libya intervention – and as the general election approaches, Republicans are making Libya’s fallout a cornerstone of their attacks the Democratic frontrunner.
But, in speaking with Clinton’s closest aides and advisors, it’s clear that she has already formulated a detailed defense. Clinton, they say, does not see the Libya intervention as a failure, but as a work in progress. The key lesson she has drawn from Libya is not that the United States should always avoid intervention or steer clear from the Middle East altogether, but that it needs to deepen its commitment to the region and find longer-term ways to engage with it. Whether or not the American public accepts that argument, it has clearly shaped Clinton’s present thinking on foreign policy.
On the campaign trail, Clinton has not shied from defending her decision to support the intervention that toppled dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. “I think President Obama made the right decision at the time,” she said in the first Democratic debate in October as she pointed to the 2012 General Assembly elections in which Libyans voted mostly for moderate parties
But that answer focused on the more promising days of 2012 – before the killing of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and the country’s descent into civil war. We are now, of course, in 2016. How does Clinton make sense of what went wrong in Libya in the years since she left the State Department? Her answer to that question is one of the keys to understanding how she will approach the Middle East if she makes it to the White House.
“[The Republicans] are going to make a big effort to suggest that the current instability in Libya reflects on the secretary,” one Clinton campaign aide told me. “But the secretary feels confident … people will see that her decision-making and her leadership helped save us from a scenario where it could have come become another Syria.”