About Pete’s take on the Benghazi matter : I think is fairly clear in testimony that the Obama Administration did lie, did cover-up what had happened, and was totally disingenuous about the whole thing. Judgement call? It was a judgement call and about international relations, not about honesty with the American public.
Muslims were in a riotous mood that season. Who really wanted to have a repeat of what happened in Benghazi elsewhere? All the stupid excuses for US inaction were palliatives for Muslim nations and intended to soothe their sensibilities. The Obama crowd do not wish to have a full-scale conflagration with the Muslim world and will say anything, sacrifice anyone, ignore any horror (consider Syria) (consider nuclear weapons in Iran) (consider the slaughter of Christians in Egypt) or bow to anyone to avoid inflaming flaming Islamists.
What else should they do? Do you think the American public has the stomach for facing down Islam? I don’t think so and as we have seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, getting involved in those nations takes a lot of guts, money and we probably will have little or no long-term effect that is any good. Though I suppose we will see about that over time.
But if the US had gone into Libya with drones or bombers or all of the military resources available so nearby, what would the rest of the Muslim world felt required, compelled, to do about it? Even if nations did nothing, but there was more and more violent rioting in the streets, how many other people would have died in other cities, simply because that is how Islam is? Al-Qaeda’s specialty is terrorizing the non-Muslim world and stirring up Muslim masses to riot and mayhem. And we don’t know what to do about that yet.
Can we blame the Obama Administration’s foreign policy experts for being squeamish about confronting or offending Islam? I guess we can, and abandoning Americans to torture and slaughter certainly goes against the grain for may of us. It is awful. But the true awfulness of the Benghazi incident is that the USA has no good response to the bigger issue of Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism. Whatever expensive and onerous Homeland Security we deploy or whatever we do militarily, we cannot prevent their attacks, we cannot cope with the modern problem that Islam presents us.
