By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 03, 2012
We’re now entering the fourth week of the “CSI: Benghazi”
hostage crisis. That’s how long an FBI forensic team has been trying to gain
access in Libya to what the State Department still calls a crime scene — the
Obama administration’s preferred term for the location of the first
assassination of a U.S. ambassador since 1979 and the first successful
al-Qaeda-backed attack on U.S. soil since the 9/11 strikes. (Our embassies and
consulates are sovereign U.S. territory.)
It is perhaps not accidental that the State Department
cites the need to complete the investigation as an excuse to stay silent on the
whole matter. “You’re not going to hear anything from here unless my guidance
changes,” explained Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman. “When we
open a criminal investigation in the United States, generally, we don’t brief
out in pieces until the investigation is complete so we don’t prejudice the
outcome. I have to respect their process, obviously.”
Obviously.
There’s more helpful news for an administration that
doesn’t want to say anything about terrorism or the Middle East other than
“Osama bin Laden’s dead” and “the Iraq War is over.”
“There’s a chance we never make it in there,” a source
described as “a senior law enforcement official” told the New York Times.
“Never” may be unacceptable even to this White House, but
anything past November 6 will do just fine.
Unfortunately, the rest of the administration’s PR
operation isn’t going nearly as well. It’s not clear whether U.N. ambassador
Susan Rice lied or made a fool of herself — and the administration — when she
unequivocally blamed a YouTube video for the September 11 Libya attack and
denied that the administration’s security precautions were scandalously
insufficient.
On a slew of Sunday shows on September 16, Rice said the
two former Navy SEALs who were also killed were providing security for
Ambassador Christopher Stevens. Former Navy SEAL bodyguards do not die in safe
houses far from the person they’re protecting, just as spontaneous mobs do not
orchestrate a sophisticated ground assault complete with rocket-propelled
grenades. Stevens was not, in the words of columnist Mark Steyn, “asphyxiated
by a spontaneous class-action movie review.”
The Libya follies are merely the most visible flashpoint
of the larger unraveling of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. The
U.S.-Israel relationship has become a bad soap opera. Afghanistan is slipping
away, as our troops are being killed by the men they’re supposed to be training
for the handover. Egypt is now run by the Muslim Brotherhood. Russia casually
mocks and defies us. China is rapidly replacing us as an Asian hegemon and
rattling sabers at our ally Japan.
Most troubling, as Fred and Kimberly Kagan document in
the current issue of National Review, Iraq is rapidly becoming an Iranian
vassal state. When President Obama entered office, we had nearly 150,000 troops
in Iraq and much sway over the course that nation took. Now we have 150 and
almost no sway. Sectarian violence is up, and al-Qaeda in Iraq is resurgent.
Meanwhile, note the Kagans (the intellectuals who helped
craft the Iraq surge strategy), Iraqi airspace has become a “critical lifeline
for the vicious regime of Bashar Assad,” as he kills thousands of his own
people in Syria.
They also note that Iraq has become an essential pathway
for Iran to circumvent the sanctions intended to prevent it from pursuing a
nuclear bomb.
There’s a dark irony to all of this. At least until the
killing of bin Laden, Obama kept foreign policy out of the headlines so he
could concentrate on domestic policy. Even after bin Laden’s death, when Obama
started to tout foreign policy to compensate for a sputtering economy, the
message was that under Obama, there’s no drama.
The quiet yet massive increase in drone-strike killings,
the reluctance to support democratic regime change in Iran, saying yes to the
Afghan surge while insisting on an expiration date, his unwillingness to push
for a continued presence in Iraq, his capitulation to Bush policies on
Guantanamo Bay and domestic terror trials, the administration’s reflexive
spinning of thwarted and actual terrorism attacks (the Times Square and
“underwear” bombers, the Fort Hood shooting) as “isolated incidents” — all gave
the impression there was nothing to worry about with Obama at the helm.
But making problems easy to ignore isn’t the same thing
as solving them. How fitting, then, that the game of kick-the-can faltered just
five weeks from Election Day.
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