After the sea landing on Wednesday, the "unity government" began holding official meetings on Thursday, but inside the heavily guard naval base. How the "unity" Prime Minister Fayez Sirraj and six other members of the Presidency Council can extend their authority across Tripoli and then across Libya clearly remained a work in progress, however.
The image of these "unity" officials, representing what's called the Government of National Accord, holed up with their backs to the sea at a naval base, unable to dispatch their subordinates to take control of government buildings and ministries, recalls how the previous internationally recognized government, the House of Representatives or HOR, met on a cruise ship in Tobruk in the east.
Meanwhile, HOR's chief rival, the General National Congress, renamed the National Salvation government, insisted on its legitimacy in Tripoli, but its control, too, was limited to several Libyan cities.
On Wednesday, National Salvation leader Khalifa Ghwell called the "unity" officials at the naval base "infiltrators" and demanded their surrender. Representatives of the "unity government" then threatened to deliver its rivals' names to Interpol and the U.N. for "supporting terrorism."
On Friday, the European Union imposed asset freezes on Ghwell and the leaders of the rival parliaments in Tripoli and in Tobruk. According to some accounts, the mix of carrots and sticks has achieved some progress for the "unity" government as 10 towns and cities in western Libya indicated their support for the new leadership.
Political Stakes
The success or failure of this latest Obama administration effort to impose some order on Libya -- and get the participants in the civil war to concentrate their fire on the Islamic State -- could have consequences politically in the United States as well.
The continuing crisis threatens to remind Democratic primary voters about Hillary Clinton's role in sparking the chaos in 2011 when she pressured President Obama to counter a military offensive by Gaddafi against what he called Islamic terrorists operating in the east.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies before Congress on Jan. 23, 2013, about the fatal attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11. 2012.
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Though Clinton and other "liberal interventionists" around Obama insisted that the goal was simply to protect Libyans from a possible slaughter, the U.S.-backed air strikes inside Libya quickly expanded into a "regime change" operation, slaughtering much of the Libyan army.
Clinton's State Department email exchanges revealed that her aides saw the Libyan war as a chance to pronounce a "Clinton doctrine," bragging about how Clinton's clever use of "smart power" could get rid of demonized foreign leaders like Gaddafi. But the Clinton team was thwarted when President Obama seized the spotlight when Gaddafi's government fell.
But Clinton didn't miss a second chance to take credit on Oct. 20, 2011, after militants captured Gaddafi, sodomized him with a knife and then murdered him. Appearing on a TV interview, Clinton celebrated Gaddafi's demise with the quip, "we came; we saw; he died."
However, with Gaddafi and his largely secular regime out of the way, Islamic militants expanded their power over the country. Some were terrorists, just as Gaddafi had warned.
One Islamic terror group attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, killing U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other American personnel, an incident that Clinton called the worst moment of her four-year tenure as Secretary of State.
As the violence spread, the United States and other Western countries abandoned their embassies in Tripoli. Once prosperous with many social services, Libya descended into the category of failed state with the Islamic State taking advantage of the power vacuum to seize control of Sirte and other territory. In one grisly incident, Islamic State militants marched Coptic Christians onto a beach and beheaded them.
Yet, on the campaign trail, Clinton continues to defend her judgment in instigating the Libyan war. She claims that Gaddafi had "American blood on his hands," although she doesn't spell out exactly what she's referring to. There remain serious questions about the two primary incidents blamed on Libya in which Americans died -- the 1986 La Belle bombing in Berlin and the bombing of Pan Am 107 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
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