Three days after
Ambassador Chris Stevens was assassinated, Jay Carney told the White House
press corps it had been the work of a flash mob inflamed by an insulting video
about the Prophet Muhammad.
As the killers had
arrived with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons, this story seemed
noncredible on its face.
Yet two days
later, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice doubled down. Appearing on five Sunday talk
shows, she called the massacre the result of a “spontaneous” riot that was
neither “preplanned” nor “premeditated.”
Carney and Rice
deceived us. But were they deceived?
It is impossible
to believe that Carney would characterize the Benghazi, Libya, massacre as the
result of a protest that careened out of control unless he had been told to do
so by the national security adviser, the White House chief of staff or
President Barack Obama himself.
Who told Carney to
say what he did? Who arranged for Rice to appear on five shows to push this
line?
Throwing a rope to
Rice and Carney, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said
last week that only recently had his team concluded that Benghazi was the work
of terrorists.
Yet intelligence
insiders were leaking to the press the day after Stevens was murdered that it
was terrorism.
Now that the cover
story—that the murder of Stevens and the other Americans was the result of a
spontaneous outburst the Obama administration could not have foreseen or
prevented—has collapsed, the truth is tumbling out.
And the truth is
more alarming. For it calls into question the credibility and competence of
Obama’s security team and the judgment of the president himself.
What do we now
know?
Stevens believed
he was on an al-Qaida hit list and so wrote in his diary. He was concerned
about a rise in Islamic extremism in the city. “Days before the ambassador
arrived from the embassy in Tripoli,” The Washington Post reported
Sunday, “Westerners had fled the city, and the British had closed their
consulate.”
Rice insisted that
the act of barbarism arose out of a protest, but there may not even have been a
protest, just a military assault with RPGs, machine guns and mortars that hit a
safe house a mile from the consulate, killing two former Navy SEALs, while
other U.S. agents fled to the airport.
So dangerous is
Benghazi, The New York Times reported
Friday, FBI agents investigating the ambassador’s assassination have yet to
venture into the city.
Was U.S.
intelligence oblivious to how dangerous Benghazi was when Stevens went in? Was
not Benghazi’s reputation as a haven for Islamic jihadi known to us all before
we “liberated” Libya?
This is the city U.S.
air power saved when Moammar Gadhafi’s forces were closing in. It now appears
to be an al-Qaidaville where U.S. diplomats and agents dare not tread.
Late last week,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton conceded that the Benghazi murders were acts
of terror perpetrated by extremists associated with al-Qaida in the Islamic
Maghreb. She alluded to Mali, where an al-Qaida affiliate, the Ansar Dine, has
taken over half the country.
How grave is that
threat?
On Thursday, The
Associated Press reported that Gen. Carter Ham, head of the U.S. Africa
command, met with Mauretania’s president to discuss “a possible military
intervention ... in north Mali against al-Qaida-linked group members and their
allies.”
Yet Vice President
Joe Biden still campaigns through the Rust Belt bellowing, “General Motors is
alive, and Osama bin Laden is dead,” and Obama still recites his mantra,
“al-Qaida is on the path to defeat.”
The reality.
Al-Qaida affiliates have taken over a region of Mali the size of France.
Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb may have been in on the Benghazi massacre.
Al-Qaida is in Syria fighting for a cause, the overthrow of Bashar Assad, Obama
supports. Al-Qaida has helped reignite sectarian war in Iraq. Al-Qaida remains
in Pakistan. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is in Yemen.
We failed to cut
out or kill the cancer at Tora Bora in 2001, and it has since metastasized and
spread across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
As for the Arab
Spring Obama embraced, that has given us the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo and
jihadi in Sinai. Our departure from Iraq paved the way to a new sectarian war.
The surge troops are out of Afghanistan, and the remaining U.S. troops no
longer partner with the Afghan soldiers who are to take over the war.
Any doubt about
the outcome there when we’re gone?
Within the past
month, anti-American riots, flag burnings and the raising of Islamist banners
atop U.S. embassy facilities have occurred in too many countries and capitals
to recite.
If this is the
fruit of a successful engagement with the Islamic world, what would a debacle
look like? Rep. Paul Ryan said Sunday, “The Obama foreign policy is unraveling
literally before our eyes on our TV screens.”
Is he wrong?
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