The Obama administration's flip-flop on supporting the regime of Moammar Gadhafi triggered the violence and instability rife in Libya today, says Clare Lopez, vice president for research and analysis at the Center for Security Policy.
"We abandoned Moammar Gadhafi, our ally, who at our insistence got rid of his WMDs [weapons of mass destruction], his incipient growing nuclear program, his chemical weapons and so forth," Lopez said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"[He] came over to assist our side in the war on terror, had al-Qaida in his prisons, including some we had released from Gitmo … and we turn around in 2011 under the influence of what — the MI6, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council?
"And [we] join with his enemies, who are al-Qaida affiliates, to oust him from power and now look at Libya. We're in 2015 now, look at the mess."
Lopez, a former CIA operations officer and intelligence expert, said that through the upheaval in 2011 the U.S. was operating a gun-running business
"There were two gun-running operations, really. If you look at 2011 when [Ambassador] Christopher Stevens was envoy to the rebels — that is America's first envoy to al-Qaida — the weapons came into Libya," she said.
"That's on top of all the weapons that were seized from Gadhafi's own stockpiles and weapons depots in the course of the war."
Stevens and other Americans were later killed in a terrorist attack in Benghazi.
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