President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory" with the toppling of former Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra told
Newsmax TV on Friday.
"The analogy is almost 100 percent the same except for one thing, Saddam Hussein was not an ally of the United States. He wasn't helping us fight the threats that we faced in the Middle East. He was an enemy of the United States. Gadhafi was an ally of the United States."
"This is an example of where after 20 years of bipartisan Republican and Democrat efforts to bring Gadhafi in, we succeeded," Hoekstra, a Republican who served Michigan in the House for 18 years, told "The Hard Line" host Ed Berliner.
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Hoekstra is the author of the new book,
"Architects of Disaster: The Destruction of Libya."
He asserts that the Obama administration is primarily responsible for turmoil in Libya and that despite Gadhafi's viciousness, he later became an ally of the United States.
Libya is now controlled by terrorists and radical jihadists — the Islamic State among them — Hoekstra said, and that's where current U.S. policy remains deeply flawed.
"They believed that they could work with and trust radical jihadists," he said of Obama and Clinton. "It's the same strategy they used in Yemen, Egypt, and Libya. It failed every time."
"These people are evil. We need to confront, contain, and destroy them."
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