Jennifer Rubin, one of Washington Post’s neoconservative gate-keepers, is still trying to obfuscate the real issue behind what happened in Benghazi in 2011. Over the weekend, Rubin wrote:
“The biggest scandal regarding Benghazi may be that the president was not at the helm on 9-11-2011 and was not directing the response to an attack.”
Yet, one must look beyond the superficial to locate the heart of what happened in Benghazi.
As Ron Paul pointed out: "there was little extremism in Libya before the US attack on that country in 2011."
Is that not an important piece to the story?
In yesterday’s Washington Post, neo-conservative editorial page editor Fred Hiatt has a panic attack over the (imagined by him) possibility that President Obama is in his second term beginning to ponder some of the limitations of US interventionism world-wide.
On the proposed withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan next year, after 13 years of war, Hiatt claims:
“To say the war will end because U.S. troops are gone is like the toddler who imagines no one can see him when he closes his eyes. But it fits with the foreign policy of a leader who is on track, astonishingly, to preside over a sharp turn inward.“I say astonishingly because when he ran in 2008, Obama presented himself as a man who would lead the United States into a new era of international engagement, idealism and cooperation.”
Who really is the toddler in his little vignette? Actually, a foreign policy of nonintervention would have likely avoided creating the very problem that the neo-cons demand we now solve. As we know, the forces that Hiatt urges we keep fighting are largely the same “freedom fighters” armed by the U.S. to fight the Soviets. And even a toddler would probably understand that bureaucrats living on the other side of the world should not be seeking to remake Afghanistan in their own image.
Hiatt is an historical revisionist extraordinaire, and his rewriting of events to suit his ideological agenda is pure conspiracy theory. According to Hiatt, it was not intervention itself but in fact a lack of sufficient intervention that has left Libya a bloody, gaping, and dangerous wound two years later:
Shortly after the US Secretary of Defense weakly claimed that chemical weapons have been used in Syria, the neocons went directly onto warpath mode. Never mind that no evidence was presented at all to substantiate the claims and the US intelligence community appears to have been blindsided by Secretary Hagel, who was himself blindsided by claims from an Israeli general immediately after he departed the country. Truth has never impeded the neo-cons at all, and they have been pining for war with Syria from the beginning: now there was something tangible that they could sink their teeth into. A gift from Hagel. They saw red – a "red line" to be exact.
"The Syrian people are angry and bitter at the United States. I was in a refugee camp in Jordan, and there're thousands of people and kids, and this woman who's a school teacher said, 'Senator McCain, you see these children here. They're going to take revenge on those people who refuse to help them.' They're angry and bitter, and that legacy could last for a long time too, unless we assist them."
-Sen. John McCain
