There was a moment early on during Thursday's long-awaited Benghazi hearing when Hillary Clinton looked a bit uncomfortable. It came when the Republican congressman Peter Roskam, of Illinois, was asking the former Secretary of State about the debates that took place inside the Obama Administration in early 2011 about intervening in Libya, where Muammar Qaddafi was struggling to fight off an uprising.

Referring to internal memos and communications that have emerged from the countless inquiries into the September, 2012, deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans at U.S. installations in Benghazi, Roskam pointed out that a number of senior officials in the State Department were skeptical about the U.S. getting involved in Libya, as were Vice-President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. "You persuaded President Obama to intervene militarily," Roskam said to Clinton. "Isn't that right?"

In her response, Clinton conceded that "there were concerns," and that the decision had sparked vigorous internal discussion. But, she said, "at the end of the day, this was the President's decision." Ultimately, she explained, she'd recommended, based largely on "unprecedented requests" from America's European allies and the Arab League, that the U.S. assist the Libyan rebels, and President Obama had made the call to carry this out, in a limited way.

Politely but firmly, Roskam said, "I think you are underselling yourself." In the course of another exchange, he twice repeated his claim that the Libyan intervention was very much Clinton's creation, ultimately arguing that she was the one who had overcome opposition within the State Department, won over the President, helped get the support of the Arab League, and led the fight to obtain the backing of the United Nations. "You saw it, you drove it, you articulated it, and you persuaded people," Roskam said. "Did I get that wrong?"

Clinton couldn't easily tell the congressman that he was mistaken, given that members of her own staff have portrayed her as an architect of the Libyan policy. Instead, she sought, as she often has in the past, to defend the intervention, pointing to the savagery of Qaddafi's regime and the limited but decisive role played by the U.S. military.

Roskam interrupted her, affecting the look of a man who had just been asked to recall a recent root canal. With his time for questioning winding down, he described the current situation in Libya as "a disaster." Clinton, doing her best to maintain a smile, said, "That's not a view I will ascribe to."

As the hearing went on (and on, and on), this exchange was lost amid the endless back and forth about security arrangements in Benghazi, the conduct of the committee's investigation, and, most ludicrously of all, some e-mails sent to Clinton by Sidney Blumenthal, a former political journalist who once worked at this magazine. By the time the hearing broke for lunch, with the Republicans and Democrats on the committee squabbling about whether to release transcripts of a closed-door interview that the panel conducted with Blumenthal in June, it was clear that Clinton was going to emerge largely unscathed. Trey Gowdy and his colleagues on the Select Committee had turned up nothing new—nada—that linked the former Secretary of State to the lax consular-security arrangements identified in previous reports, including one issued in 2012 by the State Department's own Accountability Review Board.

That was confirmed during the afternoon session, as the Republican questioners went over the same ground repeatedly. At one of the many low points, Roskam undermined his earlier points with a blatantly political attack, accusing Clinton of trying to spin Qaddafi's overthrow to her own advantage and accusing her—shock, horror—of taking a "victory lap" on the Sunday talk shows.

Of course, none of this had anything to do with what happened in Benghazi. But, in the earlier jousting between Roskam and Clinton about the wisdom of intervening in Libya in the first place, it was possible to glimpse an alternative path that congressional Republicans could have taken over the past three years—a path that might have saved them from being accused (including by members of their own party) of conducting a witch hunt, and might even have served a public purpose. For while the former Secretary of State was perfectly right in saying that the U.S. goal of overthrowing a cruel dictatorship and promoting democracy was a noble one, and that the Obama Administration, in sending U.S. warplanes, was answering international calls for help, the current reality in Libya calls into question U.S. policy decisions. The country is a divided, chaotic, and war-torn place, where rival militias are competing for power and jihadist groups, including the Islamic State, control substantial pieces of territory.

Did Clinton and those of her colleagues who supported the 2011 intervention foresee any of this happening? What steps did they