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The Grey Lady Investigates Hillary Clinton’s Libya Decision

This is the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military action in another Muslim country.

Call it politics or call it news, but days after Hillary Clinton’s rout of Bernie Sander in South Carolina the New York Times came out with a massive, two-part investigation [1] of her part in the American decision to intervene militarily in Libya.

Like all microscopic probes, it is none too flattering. “President Obama was deeply wary of another military venture in a Muslim country. Most of his senior advisers were telling him to stay out,” the report begins.

Clinton, who is portrayed as exacting, engaged and knowledgeable, was critical in “persuading Mr. Obama to join allies in bombing Colonel Qaddafi’s forces” while his defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, who “would later say that in a “51-49” decision, it was Mrs. Clinton’s support that put the ambivalent president over the line.”

“The consequences would be more far-reaching than anyone imagined, leaving Libya a failed state and a terrorist haven, a place where the direst answers to Mrs. Clinton’s questions have come to pass.”