Politics Disguised as the Fog of War

| May 11, 2013

That title is not mine; it’s taken from an excellent article by Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal titled The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi. Noonan went a little wobbly back in the 2008 campaign when she, like so many others, let her emotions overrule her commonsense judgment about Barack Obama. This latest posting at the WSJ shows she’s stable and clear headed once again. In fact, it is the best explanation I’ve read yet as to why there was no effective military response by American forces.

Quite simply, there was no aggressive response because, as we’ve long suspected, a political decision was made early on not to respond. It was not that we didn’t have forces available, both air assets and troops, ready and able to intervene; despite all the excuses made by the administration and even our dishonorable military commanders, it wasn’t that we couldn’t do something, it was because a decision had been made that we were not going to do anything.
As Noonan explains, the truth that this was a terrorist attack was politically inconvenient to the Obama 2012 re-election campaign. The Democrats, including their leader, had been gloating that with the demise of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda was dead, no longer a serious threat to American interests. An Al Qaeda led attack on a sovereign American possession, even on foreign soil, put the lie to that boast. More importantly, such aggression by Al Qaeda required an aggressive response by our military forces.

On the other hand, and this is where Noonan nails it, a mere out of control demonstration by angry Muslims, outraged over a sophomoric You Tube video, would not require a military response. In fact, an American military response to a mere riot would be a clearly inappropriate intervention into the sovereign affairs of Libya. And right there, folks, is the answer as to why the orders to stand down were issued. In order to meet the political needs of the Obama re-election campaign, this event could not be seen as a terrorist attack so it was hurriedly morphed into a deadly demonstration incited by an American-made video.
The political decision to remake this Al Qaeda attack into a demonstration didn’t come from the military, even though the current command structure is clearly carrying water for the Obama administration; nor did it come, as the White house has claimed, from the intelligence community. The recent congressional whistleblower testimony makes that clear. So that leaves Hillary Clinton’s State Department and Obama’s White House, most likely working in collusion, to create the false narrative. Their motive seems fairly simple: maintaining Democrat control of the executive branch.

That’s cold, really cold; a political decision is made that a terrorist attack must be presented to American voters as a demonstration and therefore no military response is possible, no matter how dire the consequences may become for those under attack. As we now know, it was a death sentence for four Americans, one of whom was our ambassador to that country. What we don’t know is who the scheming, calculating politicos were who made that cold, deadly decision.

Not yet anyway…

Go read Noonan’s entire article for the best dissection of this political scheme to date.

Crossposted at American Thinker.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Military issues

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Ex-PH2

I’m too angry to read that article right now, Poetrooper, but I will later.

UpNorth

“What we don’t know is who the scheming, calculating politicos were who made that cold, deadly decision.”
Alex, I’ll take The President and the Secretary of State for $1000.

SteveS

Agreed. This is the most coherent line of media reasoning on this sad sorry incident I’ve read so far.
And yet, and yet…. there are STILL Democratic mouthpieces out there who firmly believe that “Benghazi happened a long time ago, what difference does it matter?”
I’d be willing to bet that career State Dept FSO’s serving in out of the way shitholes have to be asking if they’re next, given that “the most transparent administration in history” left a sitting Ambassador, and three other Americans, twisting slowly in the wind for nothing more than political expediency. I’m thinking that has to be great for morale.

OWB

Wow. Just WOW!

streetsweeper

Two words, Poetrooper. “Valerie” and “Jarret”.

AW1 Tim

We’ve got a pretty good idea of the names on the short list of who made those decisions. Obama & Clinton are right at the top because I simply cannot believe that such decisions were made without their knowledge.

Having said that, there is more than enough evidence already to begin Impeachment proceedings against the President, even if a guilty verdict were to put Slow Joe Biden into the White House. Nixon was brought up on far lesser charges than culpability in the deaths of 4 Americans.

In my book, any Conservative member of the House NOT voting for impeachment at this point needs to be voted out of office at the earliest opportunity.

Debbie

The blood in the water is from the hands trying to wash it away.

My children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will never forget those four men and their families. God bless Mr Hicks and the other ordinary men doing extra ordinary things. They are on my list of heroes.

Ex-PH2

This sticks out like a sore thumb: “The president, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, had taken to suggesting al Qaeda was over. Al Qaeda was done. But if an al Qaeda offshoot in Libya was killing our diplomats, the age of terrorism was not over.”

I want to remind all of you that a branch of al Qaeda had already invaded Mali, taking over the very ancient city of Timbuktu, in July 2012. This was all over the news for a few short weeks. The al Qaeda affiliates in the central African region had never been put out of business and intended to use northern Mali and Timbuktu as a base of operations. The time between that early July invasion of Mali and the September 11 attack on the embassy in Benghazi, Libya was a few short weeks, and there is nothing to say that al Qaeda had not infiltrated the efforts to eliminate Mohamar Qadafi earlier, when that was going on. So the idea that al Qaeda was out of business with the death of bin Laden was both naive and ludicrous.

What bothers me the most about this administration is the sheer, unfiltered ignorance of real-world events. It’s as though nothing matters as long as we get to see them looking good and smiling. That scares me a whole lot more than having drunk uncle Joey in the Oval Office.

Doc Bailey

You know what truly scares me? It’s thought that these are the same idiots prosecuting the war effort in Afghanistan. It begs the question, how many of our ground pounders have been a little too far out on the limb for political gains (COP Keating for example) will get royally corn cobbed when the desperately needed support they call for just isn’t there.

These are not toy soldiers. Not plastic green army men that you can just glue back together. These are real men and women whose lives will be destroyed, because someone got squeamish about the political fall out.

Honestly it’s like reading pages right out of the Soviet military history. Insane.

LebbenB

@9 “Honestly it’s like reading pages right out of the Soviet military history. Insane.”

Well, it’s not like the POTUS would want to establish a socialist workers paradise here in the US…

I agree that if the allegations prove true, impeachment proceedings should begin. But as someone posted earlier this week, the American public at large is so snowed by the liberal mass media that the popular outrage needed to get the impeachment ball rolling is missing.

I quote one of my co-workers, “Who’s this Benghazi guy everybody’s getting worked up about?”

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Ex-PH2

If you look back at the last few Democrats who were presidents, I doubt that you would find even one of them, from Kenney to Johnson, and even Clinton – no matter how much you dislike him – who would have left US embassy staff flapping in the wind with no support.

There’s so much that has happened since this administration started that borders on crminal behavior, including Holder’s saying that using armed drones on US soil to target/kill American citizens is OK – no, we have police and the FBI for law enforcement; it’s their job – it has me wondering exactly how much scum there is hiding under the surface that we don’t actually know about YET.

Nixon did a lot of bad things and a lot of stupid things, including targeting people and organizations he considered political enemies, like that 85-year-old lady who sent a dollar to the DNC campaign fund. But I can’t recall anything, not even the Kent State shootings, which he was not involved in, that was this appalling.

But there IS that old saying: Shit floats, so don’t blow the overboard discharge pipes just yet.

defendUSA

I said it on the post below. How many people does it take to collude? One person would never work. Multiple people. Obama, Clinton, Panetta, Rice, Nuland, Carney, Ben Rhodes, and there must be many more.

What I am sorry about is that good men waited 8 months before coming forward and now we must watch the idiot clowns circle jerk until someone has the balls to call for impeaching and charging them all with treason. Should no one do it? Then I’ll be putting up a Paypal button…I’ll title the film “DefendUSA goes to Washington” Any takers?

A Proud Infidel

Just how soon will the NAACP, Jackson, Sharpton, et al. flash the race card over the airwaves (with the help of the far left’s lackeys in the media) as soon as Impeachment is even seriously mentioned? We’re also cursed with partisan sluts in the dhimmicrat Senate that WILL NOT cross their party line no matter what, and I wonder if Reid would even introduce it ti the Senate floor? Don’t get me wrong, I’m ALL FOR impeachment too, but I’m just thinking about the cheap stunts that Hussein & Co. are going to pull!

DaveO

I am of the belief that the decision not to act was made well before the event, in close coordination with the Muslim Brotherhood.

What we know:

POTUS, SecDef, SecState, DCI informed that terrorists attacked US resources in Benghazi.

On-site personnel were surprised to hear of a before-unheard-of video being declared the Official Cause of the ‘Demonstration-Turned-Violent’ which was Hillary’s and Obama’s original position. (as an aside, the video’s maker, under the pseudonym Sam Bacile, is arrested. Later, it turns out Bacile is really Nakoula Bassely Nakoula and there is actually a legal reason to imprison Nakoula – but that is not learned until after Nakoula as Sam Bacile is arrested to appease Muslims)

The lines of communication between POTUS, SecDef, SecState, DNI were open, functioning, and had been used in the past in such matters as taking out Bin Laden, to smaller matters.

POTUS, SecDef, SecState did not talk to each other. Not once. All comms were handled several levels below the Primaries because… ? These folks have personal and professional relationships, and communicate regularly through a variety of means. But not that day.

DNI is forced out due to a charge of adultery within days of Benghazi. Along with Petraeus, several FOGO in EUCOM and AFRICOM are relieved.

Where did the weapons, including Stinger and SA-7, that were going to the Syrian rebels (loaded with AQ terrorists) go?

Means, method, motive.

It is nice to see the non-Fox media covering the story, but the editors and owners will shut this down shortly.

Hondo

Ex-PH2: I agree that Kennedy and LBJ would have acted. Given how many times the Clinton administration reportedly passed on taking out bin Laden and/or taking custody of bin Laden when he was offered to us on a silver platter by Sudan and/or the Saudis, I’m not optimistic that Clinton would have done anything meaningful.

And in case someone wants to bring up Clinton’s “throw a few Tomahawks at the problem” episode in the late 1990s: don’t. That smacks deeply of a “Wag the Tog” moment designed to distract public opinion from the Lewinsky drama. If so, well, it worked.

To some degree, Kennedy and LBJ understood war. Clinton viewed terrorism by an entity that had declared war on the US as a “law enforcement problem” – and in general treated it as exactly that.