Why the ambassador died: Thoughtless U.S. policy in north Africa
But the story raises deeper and far more troubling questions about how unprepared the administration was to deal with the new situation its intervention in Libya created. For months now, the security situation throughout Libya, in neighboring Mali, and in other countries has been deteriorating sharply. Bands of jihadis and their supporters are roaming almost at will. Under conditions like this, it was only a matter of time before American citizens or diplomats would be attacked or taken hostage.
This latest news is just one more piece of evidence pointing to the unhappy reality that the administration intervention in Libya was something the White House did not fully understand and for whose consequences it did not prepare. Washington jumped into Libya without knowing what it was doing; as the situation unraveled it dithered and delayed. Perhaps the White House didn’t want anybody to notice just how big a mess it had made and hoped that if America didn’t do anything dramatic the mess would just quietly go away on its own; perhaps it took a long time for the penny to drop.
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Because the Dog Eating Coward left him and the others to die, abandoned like roadkill.
Bishop on November 5, 2012 at 9:25 PM
Ambassador Stevens died because obama wanted him dead – we don’t know WHY, yet, but we will.
Pork-Chop on November 5, 2012 at 9:25 PM
That’s what the blueprint said, anyway.
OldEnglish on November 5, 2012 at 9:25 PM
Meanwhile, we still await the release of the stand down order from one of the major networks.
nobar on November 5, 2012 at 9:27 PM
He is Barack Hussein Obama.
That’s all he was relying on.
He couldn’t imagine them attacking (him) the consulate.
He’s not Bush. Bush would’ve wanted a larger security footprint on the ground. So He did the opposite.
It’s why he blamed the video and the “shadowy” Coptic Christian. He was a product of the Pre-Obama era. He was Bush by extension.
Ben Hur on November 5, 2012 at 9:31 PM
Barry saw Libya as an easy trick, an easy feather in his foreign policy cap, without regard to any serious consideration of our national interest. Now it comes home to bite him in his filthy, empty lying arse.
petefrt on November 5, 2012 at 9:31 PM
0bama used the US military as his personal mercenary army and spent a Billion American taxpayers money, handed the country to al qaeda, and he expected what to happen – exactly?
Rebar on November 5, 2012 at 9:32 PM
a case of mistaken death? ….
ted c on November 5, 2012 at 9:35 PM
the ambassador died because the tree of democratic power must occasionally be watered by the drowning of party girls in chappaquiddick and the blood of a US ambassador.
h/t jefferson *sorta.
ted c on November 5, 2012 at 9:36 PM
One of the many outrages of this story is that the administration knew that an attack was coming for hours before it happened. The jihadis were setting up roadblocks and weapons checkpoints all around the consulate even before darkness fell, in full view of everybody in the neighborhood. Obama and his stooges keep insisting that there wasn’t enough time to get more forces to the consulate to help the Americans there after the attack commenced, but that it complete B.S. They would have had plenty of time if they’d acted hours earlier, when they were first advised there was an attack coming.
But Obama’s policy is that it is better to let Americans die than to use force and risk harming a Muslim civilian. So those poor people in the consulate were expendable. It was only because of the heroic determination of Doherty and Woods that the American death toll was not much higher that night.
It’s beyond sickening.
AZCoyote on November 5, 2012 at 9:42 PM
Because his C-i-C was a cowardly sympathizer. Nothing more, nothing less. THAT is the ‘progressive movement’ in the U.S.
jersey taxpayer on November 5, 2012 at 9:43 PM
Exactly.
At least Romney knows that Mali has problems.
Does Obama even know that Mali exists?
AesopFan on November 5, 2012 at 9:48 PM
Read the whole essay. The entire Libyan adventure was a mistake, and Obysmal’s hubris in undertaking it is the root of the whole problem.
Qaddafi warned about the jihadist camps in eastern Libya. Screwball that he was, Qaddafi had a lid on these terrorists. Obysmal unleashed them.
onlineanalyst on November 5, 2012 at 9:59 PM
The Benghazi Story: Mass Grave of Reputations
Maybe the anonymous “senior U.S. intelligence officials” who gave out a “detailed timeline” about the Benghazi fiasco on Thursday never heard of Healy’s Law: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”
That is because the hole in which they found themselves will surely end up a mass grave for their reputations and for many others’ — beginning with General David Petraeus.
Petraeus’ sterling reputation was beginning to become forever tarnished by the failure of his COIN strategy, but that’s a tale for another post, because the “detailed timeline” that was briefed or e-mailed to the media is coming under severe attack on The Hill and elsewhere — particularly by Fox.
The “detailed timeline” contains glaring conflicts with earlier background briefings, leaks, and independent reporting, but, most importantly, it contains conflicts with what Petraeus himself told Congress when he, just three days after the attack, was calling it, as described by the inimitable Mark Steyn, a “movie review that just got a little out of hand.”
VorDaj on November 5, 2012 at 10:09 PM
May Benghazi destroy Obama/Hillary et all related.
Schadenfreude on November 5, 2012 at 10:11 PM
Mead is an interesting Democrat. From his wiki profile…
Most of what he writes is topical, relevant, and thoughtfully written…a rarity these days for Dems.
marybel on November 5, 2012 at 10:59 PM
Obama is too busy schmoozing with Jay-Z and yelling” Are ya fired dup!” to do his job of the essential security of the nation.
This loser must be fired tomorrow.
profitsbeard on November 5, 2012 at 11:08 PM
One thing missing from this fiasco is any discussion of CIA’s involvement shipping arms to “Syrian rebels” aka “Jihadists”. Hillary decided last week to stop working with them, allegedly because of infighting. Libya and Egypt have been absolute disasters wrought by clueless Utopians with not understanding of vacuums and the chaos they cause, as well as the narcissism of a president who thought he could charm the “Muslim world” into love, peace and happiness. This disastrous foreign policy is also to be expected from an administration who betrayed Poland and ceded missile defense to Russia (with the idiotic reset button) as one of its first acts. Now Russian subs flirt with our shores off the coast of Georgia and earlier this year in the West Coast but BO says nothing because reset. And then there’s his betrayal of the U.K. with the Falkland Islands…
Buy Danish on November 6, 2012 at 7:32 AM
I agree. Mead ranks up there with Hitchens, for me. (Hitchens RIP.) I would add Mamet, but I guess we can’t call him a Dem any more.
petefrt on November 6, 2012 at 8:12 AM