By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
We have had ambassadors murdered abroad before, but we
have never seen anything quite like the tragic fate of Chris Stevens. Amid all
the controversy over Libya, we have lost sight of the human — and often
horrific — story of Benghazi: a U.S. ambassador attacked, cut off and killed
alone, after being abused by frenzied terrorists, and a second member of the
embassy staff murdered, as two American private citizens rushed to the rescue,
heroically warding off Islamist hit teams, until they were overwhelmed and also
killed.
Seven weeks after the tragedy in Benghazi, new government
narratives just keep appearing, as various branches of government point the
finger at one another. Now the president insists that “the minute” he “found
out what was going on” he gave “very clear directives” to “make sure that we
are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to.” The secretary of
defense argues that he knew too little to send in military forces to save the
post. Meanwhile, we are hearing from other sources that the beleaguered
compound in extremis was denied help on three separate occasions, and there are
still more contradictory accounts.
When the government systematically misleads and cannot
establish a believable narrative, almost everyone involved is eventually
tarred. The final chart of those officials in the Nixon White House who were
devoured by Watergate was vast — and so it is becoming with the disaster in
Libya. If we have learned anything from Watergate and Iran-Contra, it is that
the longer officials deceive and obfuscate, the greater the number of wrecked
careers and reputations.
Most likely, the political wing of the White House almost
immediately made a decision that the attack on our Benghazi consulate should
not endanger the conventional narrative of a successful commander-in-chief —
ahead in the polls in part because he had highlighted a supposedly successful
foreign policy. Key to that story was the notion that the hit on bin Laden and
the drone attacks on other Islamists had rendered al-Qaeda all but impotent. In
addition, the administration’s supposed lead-from-behind strategy in Libya had
served as a model for energizing a democratic Arab Spring. Commander-in-Chief
Obama was intent on reminding the country of his competence and toughness as an
international leader, and especially of his wise reluctance to rush into areas
of instability.
In such a landscape, Ambassador Stevens and three other
Americans were brutally murdered. And almost immediately it was clear that the
ambassador had earlier warned that Libya was descending into chaos and that
Americans were not safe there — only to have his requests for further
protection rejected.
During the actual assault on the consulate, a real-time
video, streams of e-mail exchanges, and surveys of Islamist websites confirmed
that al-Qaedists were carrying out a preplanned assassination — and over the
next seven or eight hours it became clear that our staff was in dire need of
military assistance that was somehow never sent. Then for nearly two weeks, the
president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper, Press Secretary Jay Carney, and U.N. Ambassador
Susan Rice advanced a counter-narrative that simply could not have been true: A
spontaneous demonstration over a two-month-old video — just happening to
coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 — got out of hand as some disruptive
protesters showed up with machines gun, mortars, and RPGs and began killing
Americans. Since it was an American religious bigot who had prompted such
terrible but “natural” riots with his video that ridiculed and injured Islam,
we should apologize for the uncouth among us in the strongest terms.
Obama, Clinton, Clapper, Rice, and Carney strove to outdo
each other in damning the obscure video maker — to such an extent that he was
summarily arrested on a supposedly outstanding probation charge. The message?
Ambassadors die and careful U.S. foreign policy is undermined when right-wing
bigots abuse their free-speech rights.
Yet almost all of that story is untrue, and it will come
back to haunt all those who either by intent or through ignorance engaged in
the cover-up. Review the following spinners.
President Obama still does not grasp the significance of
Libya. When he calls the attacks there and in Egypt “bumps in the road” or “not
optimal,” and asserts that they will not play much of a role in the final weeks
of the campaign, he sounds either callous or naïve or both. Collate the
administration’s statements over the two weeks following the attacks, and they
simply cannot be true. The months-old video proved just too much of a
temptation for the president to resonate the themes of his Cairo speech in
damning uncouth Americans for offending Muslims. When the president claims that
he ordered everything to be done to save the compound, he must be aware that
subordinates who did not in turn give orders that relief be sent will eventually
come forward to either affirm or deny his statement. His further problem is
that lax security, administration misdirection, and hesitancy to aid the
beleaguered all feed into the earlier attitudes framed by “overseas contingency
operations,” “man-caused disasters,” “workplace violence,” promises to try KSM
in a civilian court, the al-Arabiya interview, the Cairo speech, and other
efforts to contextualize and airbrush radical Islam’s terrorist assault on the
West. In other words, fairly or not, we can discern a logic to why the
president would not be candid and accurate about Benghazi.
Secretary Clinton will have to explain why the State
Department did not heed requests for greater security, both before and during
the attack. And she is beginning to grasp — and so especially is her husband —
that the administration is hanging the disaster around her neck. She crudely
blamed the attacks on our embassies in the Middle East on the video (with
caskets of our dead as backdrop), reminding us that a few months earlier she
had crudely giggled about the murder of Qaddafi (“We came, we saw, Qaddafi
died”). All in all, her performance during this disaster has been
disappointing, and more so with each new disclosure.
Then we come to Ambassador Rice, who apparently was being
groomed to succeed Secretary of State Clinton. As part of that trajectory, she
was to be point woman for the administration’s spontaneous-mob narrative. That
meant that on at least five different occasions Rice hit the Sunday talk shows,
apparently to showcase her rhetorical skills, insisting that the attacks in
Cairo and Benghazi were ad hoc assaults that had nothing to do with U.S.
foreign policy, anti-American animosity, or mistakes in American security
preparation. Whether through ignorance or by design, Ambassador Rice repeatedly
told an untruth, and did so with energy and dogmatic insistence. Her problem,
then, is not just that what she insisted was true was clearly not, but also the
unambiguous and forceful manner in which she wove her story. That she suddenly
appeared from obscurity to play the sophist, and then retreated back into
anonymity, suggests that her diplomatic career will be soon coming to an end.
Next is the matter of Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper. His insistence that a mob had caused the mayhem is one untruth
or mischaracterization too many — and a wrong assessment that trumps even his
earlier absurdities, such as that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely a secular
organization or that Qaddafi would not fall from power. Politicians and
bureaucrats err all the time; but when intelligence officers do not appear to
have intelligence, then they too usually quietly disappear into comfortable
retirement.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin Dempsey at
some point supposedly received information about the attack in real time. Why —
given the supposed directive of the president to do “whatever we need to” to
save our people — he did not order military assistance will have to be
explained. Uncertain conditions will not do, because that is what militaries
do: go into uncertain conditions to save lives and defeat the enemy. Armchair
tacticians will argue that planes and teams could have been sent and then
called off near arrival time if that was what circumstances seemed to warrant;
that option would have been wiser than sending no one and thereby ensuring that
the compound and annex would be overrun. And because General Dempsey has not
been shy in weighing in on matters political by warning retired servicemen not
to comment on contemporary politics (General Wesley Clark apparently excepted),
and because he has phoned a Florida pastor to tell him to tone down his
anti-Islamic rhetoric, the public will all the more expect an explanation. If
the chairman can lecture both civilians and retired officers on proper
behavior, then he should be able as well to explain why he did not heed the
president’s order to do “whatever we need to do.”
CIA Director David Petraeus is now by implication being
faulted. A brief communiqué that the CIA did not refuse pleas for assistance
was prompted by anonymous administration officials’ allegations that it was our
intelligence agencies, not the State Department or White House officials, that
prevented assistance to our diplomatic mission. At some point Petraeus will
probably have to use all his influence and power to correct the
administration’s narrative, which is apparently intended to shift culpability
to him and his agency. General Petraeus, by his singular record, probably
should have been made either chairman of the Joint Chiefs or NATO supreme
commander; he apparently received neither offer. After pulling off the surge in
Iraq, he was redeployed into Afghanistan under far different — and more
difficult — circumstances that limited his range of options, and he had to give
up his nominally superior billet as CENTCOM commander. When he took on the CIA
job, he apparently was asked to retire from the military. There is a pattern
here: selfless service to the United States, but recently in the context of a
politicized administration that has used the enormous prestige of Petraeus in
ways that have reduced his influence. Directing responsibility away from the
administration to the CIA is more of the same, and it puts a historic figure
like Petraeus in an unfair predicament.
Benghazi was a disaster, whose graphic details most
Americans do not fully know and, in some sense understandably, do not wish to
relive. Still, we await two simple clarifications: an administration timeline
of exactly who was notified, in what manner, and when on the night of the
attack, and a full release of all information detailing the administration
reaction to the murders, from the hours in which the attack occurred to the
present day.
Without that honesty, those responsible will only
continue to weave their tangled Libyan web.
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