A failure to adequately plan for the aid and governing of Libya after the U.S.-led NATO attacks in 2011 “probably” was his biggest error in office, President Barack Obama said in an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”
Asked by host Chris Wallace about the “worst mistake” of his soon-to-end White House years, Obama listed the aftermath of the ouster and death of Moammar Qaddafi, even as he defended the intervention.
“Probably failing to plan for the day after,” Obama said in the session, which was taped at the University of Chicago on April 7. He added that intervening in Libya “was the right thing to do.”
The Libya operation and its chaotic aftermath has been resurrected in the 2016 presidential campaign. That’s in part because of the increasing presence of the Islamic State there, and U.S. airstrikes to disrupt its operation.
Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, as Obama’s secretary of state, strongly supported the intervention. In a 2011 interview with CBS News when still secretary, Clinton said of Qaddafi, “We came. We saw. He died.”
Obama told Fox News that his best day in office was the one on which his signature health care plan was passed, and his worst was “the day we traveled up to Newtown,” after the shooting deaths of 20 children and six adult staff members at an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.