Hillary Clinton attempted to defend her vote for the invasion of Iraq after her husband Bill signed the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act calling for regime change in Iraq, and she tried to draw a distinction between President George W. Bush’s toppling of Saddam Hussein and her toppling of Moammar Gaddafi in Libya.  She failed miserably on both counts.  In the process, as Yahoo Politics reports, she merely indicted her own incompetence and her callous indifference to the dead of Benghazi:

“I’ve said Iraq was a mistake,” Clinton told Chris Matthews during an MSNBC town hall event on Monday night. “Libya was a different kind of calculation. And we didn’t lose a single person. We didn’t have a problem in supporting our European and Arab allies in working with NATO.”

As Hillary might say in her defense, it depends on the meaning of the word “single.”  Four Americans were lost in Libya – Ty Woods, Glen Dougherty, Sean Smith, and Ambassador Christopher Stevens.  And, she might insist, with the parsing only a Clinton could perform, they were not lost in the initial military assault in what has been called “Hillary’s War.”  They were lost later, as Libya slipped into “failed state” status.

Iraq, first of all, was not a mistake.  It was a huge success, with Sunnis and Shiites uniting under an American military umbrella to begin the long and laborious process of building a democracy.  We have all seen the iconic photos of Iraqi women, and Hillary says she fights for women’s rights, proudly displaying their fingers stained with the purple dye indicating they had voted in Iraq’s first free election.

What happened was that President Obama, whom she faithfully served as secretary of state, ignored the lessons of history, and precipitously withdrew all American forces from Iraq, creating a power vacuum the Islamic State was all too happy to fill.

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit recalls both our sacrifice and our victory in Iraq under President George W. Bush:

The United State lost 1,335 soldiers in Anbar Province during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Another 8,205 soldiers were injured in fighting in Anbar.

More US soldiers and Marines were lost in Anbar than any other Iraqi province.

By 2008, thanks to the successful Bush Troop Surge in Iraq, the insurgents had been marginalized in Anbar. With insurgents “on the run” in western Anbar province, the US was able to draw down forces in area.

But that all changed in 2011 when Barack Obama withdrew all US troops from Iraq. By 2014 ISIS had retaken Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, and more recently Ramadi.

President Bush left a stable Iraq, one where Shiite and Sunnis had learned to coexist and resist a common al-Qaeda enemy.  There were free and fair elections, and we all remember the pictures of Iraqi women holding up their purple fingers indicating they had proudly voted in those elections.  Now we have the mass graves of ISIS, beheadings, and what can only be called the ethnic cleansing of Christians.

Libya, and Hillary’s push to topple Gaddafi, was a mistake.  Gaddafi, after our Iraq victory and the pulling of Saddam Hussein from a hole in the ground, gladly surrendered his nuclear program. He was not a threat and there was no need to topple him. The Obama-Clinton administration claimed we were intervening to prevent mass slaughter. As the Washington Times reported:

“Imagine we were sitting here and Benghazi had been overrun, a city of 700,000 people, and tens of thousands of people had been slaughtered, hundreds of thousands had fled either with nowhere to go, or overwhelming Egypt while it’s in its own difficult transition,” Mrs. Clinton told ABC News on March 27 after the U.S. signed off on a U.N. resolution granting military intervention.

That claim was directly contradicted by U.S. intelligence:

The intelligence community gathered no specific evidence of an impending genocide in Libya in spring 2011, undercutting Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary argument for using the U.S. military to remove Col. Moammar Gadhafi from power, an event that has left his country in chaos, according to officials with direct knowledge of the dispute.

Hillary pushed for the toppling of Gaddafi because she hoped to make Libya the poster child for the Obama-Clinton administration’s touted “Arab Spring.”  Gregory Hicks, the no. 2 official in Libya at the time of the Benghazi attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and three others, testified before the House Oversight Committee on the real reason Stevens was in Benghazi that tragic night.  As Investor’s Business Daily said of Benghazi and its aftermath:

The disgraceful cover-up afterwards is rivaled by the disgraceful lack of security provided to the mission, which was set up to be a permanent diplomatic post at which Clinton would arrive to celebrate the triumph of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy.

Ambassador Stevens was in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, the day he died in the terrorist attack, because Clinton ordered him there. Hicks said Stephens wanted to have the Benghazi complex upgraded to a permanent constituent post so Clinton could make this announcement in her planned visit to Libya before the end of 2012.

You’re right, Hillary: not a “single” American was lost in Libya.  Four were lost.  Their deaths and the lies you told to the families of the Benghazi dead and the American people were all to further your grandiose political ambitions.  All you’ve done is to give the American people four reasons not to vote for you.  Their names are Christopher Stevens, Ty Woods, Glen Dougherty, and Sean Smith.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.