Benghazi Constructs | National Review Online
By Victor Davis Hanson 5-20-14
Much is still murky, but the Obama team was at the least guilty of negligence and deception.
Almost everything the administration has alleged about Benghazi has proven false. Yet also, in Machiavellian fashion, the Obama group successfully peddled useful fictions, effectively deluded the country, adroitly ensured President Obama’s reelection, and cast aspersions on those who sought the truth.
In that sense, so far, the lies about Benghazi have won, the truth has failed.
So what really happened?
The Obama administration felt that it was behind the curve concerning the 2011 unrest in Libya. The so-called Arab Spring revolutions had toppled other governments in North Africa, and it seemed that protesters would do the same in Syria and Libya.
Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice did not want to be “on the wrong side of history,” especially given that it looked as if Moammar Qaddafi was likely to fall soon and needed only a little nudge. Given that the British and French were out in front, “lead from behind” seemed a safe, cheap way for the U.S. to intervene and yet not quite intervene — a sort of larger version of a drone strike.
But after Qaddafi’s fall, almost everything that followed proved the U.S. intervention to be a failure. The Americans had ceded leadership to France and Britain and seemed to boast about that fact. They had distorted the U.N. resolutions by going way beyond establishing no-fly zones and sending humanitarian aid. Obama had shown no interest in sending in postbellum peacekeeping troops or in organizing a U.N. force to prevent a Mogadishu on the Mediterranean. The result was a mess for most of 2011–12, as post-Qaddafi Libya settled into something like Somalia or the Sudan.
Al-Qaeda franchises emerged just as the parent organization had been declared to be on the run. Rumors spread that jihadists were arming themselves from the unprotected Qaddafi arsenal in the fashion of an unsettled Iraq around May 2003. …
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