Benghazi

While Obama isn’t my vision of the quintessential president, he’s no worse than we deserve. Like any other, he has to deal with mistakes made by people for whom he is responsible, even if he didn’t know nor could have predicted what might have happened. It is perhaps a fault specific to the Crisis that every single mistake gets trumpeted by the opposition, minimized by the President’s party, and investigated to within an inch of Uncaused Causality.

It wasn’t that long ago that a major motion picture implied all the possible fear of the Enemy, the Other, with one word: “Libyans!” It was much less long ago that the country’s leader ended up on the wrong side of a civil war. It was less than a year after the end of NATO involvement that the “Temporary Mission Facility” in Benghazi was attacked. Which is to say, this wasn’t a hardened bunker of a consulate, built up over decades to be an unbreachable fortress. It was a recently implemented and staffed diplomatic mission that sounds like it was set up primarily to facilitate intelligence collection.

Which does lay a lot on Obama’s shoulders, considering he involved the U.S. in the civil war and authorized the consulate (certainly implicitly, if not personally and intentionally). He can’t blame the setup on Bush, nor on calcified traditions in an area where he was not personally involved. (Okay, so it was Bush who moved to normalize relations with Libya six years earlier, and who appointed the first ambassador there since 1972, and that a month after Obama’s election.)  If nothing else, he should have been aware of the  situation in a country that represented a significant foreign policy event of his first term.

I’d still say, though, that the complaints were much more about trying to embarrass the President than make substantive fixes to foreign or defense policy. I recall reading claims that “There was a ship in the Persian Gulf that could have helped but it wasn’t sent!” There is a whole other country (at least) between the Persian Gulf and Libya - it would be DAYS away at top speed. The fighting was over within a day, so even an airborne assault would probably have been too late to help - assuming one could be planned, staffed, and implemented that quickly in a state of limited intelligence. With that sort of assertion, it's not only not going to be taken seriously, it simply reeks of partisan attack.